Enhanced cellulosic D-lactic acid production from sugarcane bagasse by pre-fermentation of water-soluble carbohydrates before acid pretreatment

After several rounds of milling process for sugars extraction from sugarcane, certain amounts of water-soluble carbohydrates (WSC) still remain in sugarcane bagasse. It is a bottleneck to utilize WSC in sugarcane bagasse biorefinery, since these sugars are easily degraded into inhibitors during pretreatment. Herein, a simple prefermentation step before pretreatment was conducted, and 98 % of WSC in bagasse was fermented into D-lactic acid. The obtained D-lactic acid was stably preserved in bagasse and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) generation was sharply reduced from 46.0 mg/g to 6.2 mg/g of dry bagasse, after dilute acid pretreatment. Consequently, a higher D-lactic acid titer (57.0 g/L vs 33.2 g/L) was achieved from the whole slurry of the undetoxified and pretreated sugarcane bagasse by one-pot simultaneous saccharification and co-fermentation (SSCF), with the overall yield of 0.58 g/g dry bagasse. This study gave an efficient strategy for enhancing lactic acid production using the lignocellulosic waste from sugar industry.

Automated summary

This study showed that fermenting water-soluble carbohydrates in sugarcane bagasse into D-lactic acid before pretreatment could enhance lactic acid production and reduce the generation of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural. This strategy provides an efficient way to utilize the lignocellulosic waste from the sugar industry for lactic acid production.