Step Change for Screening Could Boost Biofuels
( Institute of Food Research/Biomass Magazine) Researchers at the Institute of Food Research have developed a new way of rapidly screening yeasts that could help produce more sustainable biofuels.
The new technique could also be a boon in the search for new ways of deriving valuable renewable chemicals from plant-based wastes, reducing our reliance on petrochemicals.
Yeasts are a key step in producing biofuels, fermenting sugars into ethanol. …
But a problem with these second-generation biofuels is that the sugars are less accessible to the yeasts.
Pretreatments are used to break open the cellular structure of the biomass, and enzymes convert the treated biomass into sugars for yeasts to ferment. But this saccharification process, along with the pretreatments, can reduce the economic viability of producing biofuels in this way. Pretreatments can also generate compounds that stop yeasts from fermenting as efficiently.
To try and boost the efficiency of generating second generation biofuels, The Biorefinery Centre at IFR has joined forces with the National Collection of Yeast Cultures , a BBSRC-supported National capability, also within IFR. NCYC has over 4,000 different yeast strains in its collection. Screening this collection could find yeasts that are naturally better at producing biofuels, especially if they are able to cope better with the compounds that reduce fermentation efficiency of conventional yeast strains. Simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) is seen as a big step forward for biorefining, as it simplifies the overall process, reducing costs. READ MORE
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