Researchers find enzyme cocktail to improve biofuel processing

Virginia Tech researchers announced a discovery of a new method simplify the conversion of biomass into fuels. The typical processing methods of upgrading biomass into transportation fuels require several steps: chemical pretreatment to break up the biomass, such as with dilute sulfuric acid; detoxification to remove the toxic chemicals; then microbial fermentation to convert the soluble sugars to fuels. Virginia Tech researchers have discovered an enzyme mixture that works in the presence of the toxin-infused liquid biomass, thus eliminating the detoxification step. The new processing method reduces costs to produce biofuels and increases biofuel yields by avoiding byproduct generation and synthesis of cell mass.

Enzymes self-assemble a cell-free synthetic pathway. The desired biological reactions work without the other complex interactions that take place within a cell. By using an enzyme cocktail consisting of 12 purified enzymes and coenzymes, this work has also demonstrated that the enzyme cocktail systems can work in the presence of microorganism-toxic compounds from dilute-acid pretreated biomass, suggesting that enzyme systems do not require high-purity substrates for biotransformation. After pretreatment, the bioconversion can be directly followed by chemical catalysis.

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