Thermochemical screening of cellulolytic enzymes for second generation bioethanol production

This project focused on the enzymatic breakdown of biomass. This is a key process in upcoming industries, which will use residue from forestry and farming and municipal waste as feedstock for the production of sustainable fuels and green alternatives to petrochemical products. The project has developed two new measuring principles, which can monitor the breakdown continuously, and thus identify potential bottlenecks in the process. One of the novel principles was monitoring the process through the heat it releases. Thus, the faster the breakdown reaction the more heat is released, and this simple principle showed some advantages including the ability to directly analyze the industrial feedstock, which is an opaque paste not readily analyzed by most methods. The work concluded that unproductive enzyme binding to the solid substrate as well as enzyme inhibition by both products and other components in the biomass are major limiting factors in the breakdown process.        
A new research project addressing these problems through the design of enzyme variants has now been initiated.