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Acid-Free Ethanol-Water Pretreatment with Low Ethanol Concentration for Robust Enzymatic Saccharification of Cellulose in Bamboo

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Abstract

Lignin deposition phenomenon during the liquid-hot-water (LHW) pretreatment negatively affects substrate enzymatic digestibility (SED). To overcome this limitation of LHW, acid-free ethanol-water (EW) pretreatment with low ethanol concentration was developed. With less cellulose loss and similar hemicellulose removal, adding 10% (v/v) ethanol into water (EW10 pretreatment) resulted in a lignin removal of 5.8% higher than that of LHW pretreatment conducted at the same conditions (such as 200 °C for 40 min). Although the lignin removal did not increase significantly, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) characterizations indicated that LHW pretreatment-induced lignin condensation was alleviated by EW10 pretreatment, leading less lignin condensates deposited on the corresponding surface of solid substrate. Moreover, compared with lignin separated from LHW-pretreated substrate, the non-productive adsorption between EW10 pretreatment-induced lignin and cellulase was significantly weakened. As a result, the SED of EW10 pretreatment was improved to 91.7%, which was higher than LHW pretreatment by 19.5%. Due to the advantages of suppressing the deposition of lignin condensates and employing ethanol at low concentration, EW10 pretreatment shows practical significance for producing fermentable sugar from abundant non-woody biomass (bamboo) in China.

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Dr. Li Shuai and Dr. Yonghui Zhou from Virginia Tech in USA and Brunel University in UK for their carefully revising language of this paper.

Funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31300495), Fujian Provincial Department of Education (Nos. JB13033, JA15181, JA14098), and New Century Excellent Talents Supporting Plan (Min [2015]54). The work is also supported by Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (2015M571955).

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  1. Jinghao Shi and Jing Liu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Materials Engineering, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, 350002, China

    Jinghao Shi, Jing Liu, Meng Li, Liulian Huang, Lihui Chen & Xiaolin Luo

  2. College of Energy, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361102, China

    Meng Li

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  1. Jinghao Shi
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  2. Jing Liu
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  3. Meng Li
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Correspondence to Liulian Huang or Xiaolin Luo.

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Shi, J., Liu, J., Li, M. et al. Acid-Free Ethanol-Water Pretreatment with Low Ethanol Concentration for Robust Enzymatic Saccharification of Cellulose in Bamboo. Bioenerg. Res. 11, 665–676 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12155-018-9928-x

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