Global energy crisis and limited supply of petroleum fuels have rekindled the worldwide focus towards development of a sustainable technology for alternative fuel production. Utilization of abundant renewable biomass offers an excellent opportunity for the development of an economical biofuel production process at a scale sufficiently large to have an impact on sustainability and security objec...

BACKGROUND N-Butanol has favorable characteristics for use as either an alternative fuel or platform chemical. Bio-based n-butanol production using microbes is an emerging technology that requires further development. Although bio-industrial microbes such as Escherichia coli have been engineered to produce n-butanol, reactive oxygen species (ROS)-mediated toxicity may limit productivity. Previo...

In situ measurements of Brønsted acid sites (by titration with 2,6-di-tert-butyl-pyridine) and reduced centers (by UV–vis spectroscopy) were carried out on WOx–ZrO2 with catalysts at 2.9– 32.3 W/nm2 in order to probe how these species form and act as active sites during 2-butanol dehydration. The rate of 2-butanol dehydration (per W-atom) on WOx–ZrO2 reached maximum values at intermediate WOx s...

Analysis of electron spin resonance spectra of 5-doxyl stearic acid in aqueous suspensions of Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC 824 and the butanol-tolerant SA-2 derivative during a small-scale fermentation at three different butanol challenge levels indicated that the SA-2 strain is able to respond to the physical fluidizing effect of high (1.5%) butanol challenge by reducing its membrane fluidi...

Pure silica zeolites are potentially hydrophobic and have therefore been considered to be interesting candidates for separating alcohols, e.g., 1-butanol, from water. Zeolites are traditionally synthesized at high pH, leading to the formation of intracrystalline defects in the form of silanol defects in the framework. These silanol groups introduce polar adsorption sites into the framework, pot...

The development of sustainable replacements for fossil fuels has been spurred by concerns over global warming effects. Biofuels are typically produced through fermentation of edible crops, or forest or agricultural residues requiring cost-intensive pretreatment. An alternative is to use photosynthetic cyanobacteria to directly convert CO2 and sunlight into fuel. In this thesis, the cyanobacteri...

IR-visible sum-frequency generation (IV-SFG) vibrational spectroscopy and a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation were used to study the local layering order at the interface of 1-butanol-d9 and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate ([bmim]PF6), a room-temperature ionic liquid (RTIL). The presence of a local non-polar layer at the interface of the two polar liquids was successfully demon...

Immunoprotective tumor antigens of experimental tumors are selectively extracted by 1-butanol. Human organ-specific cancer neoantigens (OSNs) are tumor substances in cancer extracts to which patients with cancer of the same organ respond in the in vitro assay of leukocyte adherence inhibition. Here we determined whether OSNs as measured by leukocyte adherence inhibition assay are also selective...

BACKGROUND Butanol is not only an important solvent and chemical intermediate in food and pharmaceutical industries, but also considered as an advanced biofuel. Recently, there have been resurging interests in producing biobutanol especially using low-cost lignocellulosic biomass, but the process still suffers from low titer and productivity. The challenge for the bioconversion approach is to f...

Introduction For scanning electron microscopy, our ability to examine wet specimens continually improves thanks to advances in instrumentation; nevertheless, drying wet samples remains indispensable, particularly for high resolution or for a sample that needs to be imaged repeatedly. In many laboratories, the standard method for drying is critical-point drying. In this method, samples are dehyd...