Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Benefits from Surfactants (Tween and BSA) During Enzymic Hydrolysis

It appears that Tween improves biomass enaymatic hydrolysis through three effects: enzyme stabilizer, lignocellulose disrupter, and enzyme effector. BSA treatment can improve both cellulase and beta-glucosidase activity due to the non-specific competitive, irreversible adsorption of BSA on lignin.

However, all of the research were based on the current leading pretreatment methods. Scince these pretreatments are really cost non-competitive. Any slight improvements in hydrolysis yield and reduction in enzyme loading is negligible compared with the cost of pretreatment and large scale enzyme production.

A cost effective pretreatment must be developed, which does not require harsher conditions (very acidic and very alkaline, and very high temperature). Is it possible? Yes, if we think the chemistry carefully!

When reading the most recently published review paper on pretreatments, nothing new included. I do not understand that there are so many people working in this field, but most of them just copy the ideas and focus on those so-called leading pretreatments.

I think more education on biomass chemistry is really need to train people/students to develop new approches/solve problems before fundemetal understanding of the problems.

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