A news from BiofuelsDigest on Sept. 29,2011.
That’s what Agrivida is up to.
“We are expressing all the cell wall degrading systems in the plant,” explains Agrivida CEO Michael Raab, “as the core part of our technology. We can control the activity of those enzymes so that in the plant we can express all the enzymes in dormant form. After harvest, we activate the enzymes in the material, so you don’t have to pretreat in the same way. It makes the process lower temperature, with a moderate PH, and takes out a lot of capital costs and those high costs of dilute acid pretreatment. Also, we really reduce the enzyme loading.”
Biomass feedstocks with hydrolytic enzymes may enable the industry to lower the cost of both pretreatment and enzyme production/loadings, potentially (hopefully) to solve the problem of producing cheap sugar from the root.
