Driving biomass breakdown through engineered cellulosomes

Driving biomass breakdown through engineered cellulosomes

Extraction of sugar is the rate-limiting step in converting unpretreated biomass into value-added products through microbial fermentation. Both anaerobic fungi and anaerobic bacteria have evolved to produce large multi-cellulase complexes referred to as cellulosomes, which are powerful machines for biomass deconstruction. Characterization of bacterial cellulosomes has inspired synthetic "design...

Cellulosomes-structure and ultrastructure.

The cellulosome is a macromolecular machine, whose components interact in a synergistic manner to catalyze the efficient degradation of cellulose. The cellulosome complex is composed of numerous kinds of cellulases and related enzyme subunits, which are assembled into the complex by virtue of a unique type of scaffolding subunit (scaffoldin). Each of the cellulosomal subunits consists of a mult...

Cellulosomes from mesophilic bacteria.

Biomass breakdown: A review on pretreatment, instrumentations and methods.

Enzymatic breakdown of lignocellulosic biomass for liquid fuel production is a viable alternative to fossil fuels, due to its renewable and environmental friendly nature. Naturally, plants protect their cell wall polysaccharides by giving limited access to the cell wall degrading enzymes. Lignocellulose breakdown requires proper pretreatments that disrupt the close inter-component association b...

Breakdown of cell wall nanostructure in dilute acid pretreated biomass.

The generation of bioethanol from lignocellulosic biomass holds great promise for renewable and clean energy production. A better understanding of the complex mechanisms of lignocellulose breakdown during various pretreatment methods is needed to realize this potential in a cost and energy efficient way. Here we use small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to characterize morphological changes in ...