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An aggregated understanding of the influence of aqueous ammonia pretreatment on the physical deconstruction of cell walls in sugar beet pulp

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Abstract

The underlying interplay between physicochemical property and enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose still remains unclear. The impacts of matrix glycan composition of sugar beet pulp (SBP) on physical structure and saccharification efficiency were emphasized. The results showed that aqueous ammonia (AA) pretreatment could remove the non-cellulosic polysaccharides and destroy the linkage between the pectin and lignin. The cellulose supramolecule was changed significantly after AA pretreatment, in terms of the decline in hardness, gumminess, springiness, thickness and degree of polymerization. Furthermore, vascular cell was exposed and degraded. The highest reducing sugar yield of 355.06 mg/g was obtained from the pretreated SBP (80 °C) with enzyme loading of 30 U/g, which was 1.01 times higher than that of the untreated SBP. This research also supported the idea that recognizing and precisely removing the primary epitopes in cell walls might be an ideal strategy to accomplish the improved enzymatic hydrolysis through mild pretreatment.

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Acknowledgements

This research received financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 21868018 and no. 22068028).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inner Mongolia Engineering Technology Research Center of Germplasm Resources Conservation and Utilization, School of Life Sciences, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, 010070, People’s Republic of China

    Huiting Xue, Renjie Qin, Yang Liu, Lin Yuan & Guanhua Li

  2. College of Basic Medicine, Inner Mongolia Medical University, Hohhot, 010070, People’s Republic of China

    Huiting Xue

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Contributions

XH: investigation, data curation, formal analysis; RQ data curation, writing; LY: investigation; LY: editing; GL: conceiving, writing, funding acquisition. XH and RQ contributed equally to this work. All authors contributed to the manuscript have read and approved the final version.

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Correspondence to Guanhua Li.

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Xue, H., Qin, R., Liu, Y. et al. An aggregated understanding of the influence of aqueous ammonia pretreatment on the physical deconstruction of cell walls in sugar beet pulp. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 46, 1427–1435 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-023-02908-y

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