BABET-REAL5 results presented at ELB 2018

Before the summer break started, from 26 to 29 June 2018, Harivony Rakotoarivonina and Caroline Rémond from the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, presented results from their work for the BABET-REAL5 Project at the "Exploring lignocellulosic biomass: challenges and opportunity for bioeconomy" (ELB 2018) meeting in the Centre des Congrès in Reims.
In a poster presentation they presented results on the feedstocks sweet corn cob (SCC) and barley straw (BS). These substrates are recalcitrant to enzymatic hydrolysis and numerous factors such as the presence of hemicelluloses, and lignins are known to be responsible of the biomass recalcitrance to fractionation. These later ones are known to impede the access of cellulases to the cellulose part by forming physical barriers. A physico-chemical pretreatment is thus necessary to improve enzymes efficiency. Another challenge is to hydrolyze both cellulose and xylans components from biomass and to further ferment glucose and xylose into ethanol.
In this context, the goal was to develop efficient hemicellulasic cocktails adapted to the lignocellulosic biomasses. A thermophilic and hemicellulolytic bacterium (Thermobacillus xylanilyticus) was used to develop performant hemicellulasic cocktails for improving xylose and also glucose release from different lignocellulosic biomasses by acting in combination with cellulases. For this, the enzyme productions of this bacterium were first evaluated while growing on SCC, BS and wheat bran. The enzymatic cocktails produced were used to perform hydrolysis of extruded SCC and extruded BSS at different substrate loading (low to high consistency). The performance of the hemicellulasic cocktails were benchmarked with commercial cocktails. Harivony Rakotoarivonina and Caroline Rémond showed that T. xylanilyticus was able to produce complete hemicellulases cocktails (containing xylanase, arabinosidase, xylosidase and esterases activities). The composition of enzymatic activities produced depends on the biomass used showing an adaptation of the bacterium to the chemical composition of the lignocellulose. The results demonstrate that T. xylanilyticus cocktails are efficient for pentoses release from lignocellulosic biomasses.

Professor Caroline Rémond explains her results at ELB 2018

Click at poster to enlarge

More information about the congress: https://colloque.inra.fr/explorebiomass/