Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 107, Issue 10, Pages 4516-4521Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912073107
Keywords
biofuel; carbohydrate; ethanol fermentation; ionic liquid; lignocellulose
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Funding
- Department of Energy
- National Science Foundation
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Abundant plant biomass has the potential to become a sustainable source of fuels and chemicals. Realizing this potential requires the economical conversion of recalcitrant lignocellulose into useful intermediates, such as sugars. We report a high-yielding chemical process for the hydrolysis of biomass into monosaccharides. Adding water gradually to a chloride ionic liquid-containing catalytic acid leads to a nearly 90% yield of glucose from cellulose and 70-80% yield of sugars from untreated corn stover. Ion-exclusion chromatography allows recovery of the ionic liquid and delivers sugar feedstocks that support the vigorous growth of ethanologenic microbes. This simple chemical process, which requires neither an edible plant nor a cellulase, could enable crude biomass to be the sole source of carbon for a scalable biorefinery.
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