The role of alcohol metabolism in 2-butanol-induced potentiation of carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) hepatotoxicity was studied in rats. Animals were sacrificed at various times after the administration of 2-butanol (2.2 ml/kg p.o.) for the determination of blood 2-butanol and 2-butanone concentrations by gas chromatographic analysis. 2-butanol exhibited an apparent elimination half-life of 2.5 hour...

Background Plant biomass is an abundant and renewable source of energy rich carbohydrates that can be efficiently converted by microbes into biofuels [1]. Butanol is considered as a second generation biofuel when it is produced from lignocellulosic biomass comprising of agricultural and garden wastes that does not compete with the food supplies [2]. Clostridium acetobutylicum is a gram positive...

Compared to ethanol, butanol offers many advantages as a substitute for gasoline because of higher energy content and higher hydrophobicity. Typically, 1-butanol is produced by Clostridium in a mixed-product fermentation. To facilitate strain improvement for specificity and productivity, we engineered a synthetic pathway in Escherichia coli and demonstrated the production of 1-butanol from this...

The solventogenic bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum is an important species of the Clostridium community. To develop a fundamental tool that is useful for biological studies of C. acetobutylicum, we established a high resolution proteome reference map for this species. We identified 1206 spots representing 564 different proteins by mass spectrometry, covering approximately 50% of major metab...

Biocatalytic processes often encounter problems due to toxic reactants and products, which reduce biocatalyst viability. Thus, robust organisms capable of tolerating or adapting towards such compounds are of high importance. This study systematically investigated the physiological response of Pseudomonas taiwanensis VLB120∆C biofilms when exposed to n-butanol, one of the potential next generati...

BACKGROUND Butanol is a promising next generation fuel and a bulk chemical precursor. Although clostridia are the primary industrial microbes for the fermentative production of 1-butanol, alternative engineered hosts have the potential to generate 1-butanol from alternative carbon feedstocks via synthetic metabolic pathways. Methylobacterium extorquens AM1, a facultative methylotrophic α-proteo...

This computational and theoretical study deals with chain transfer to solvent (CTS) reactions of methyl acrylate (MA), ethyl acrylate (EA), and n-butyl acrylate (n-BA) self-initiated homopolymerization in solvents such as butanol (polar, protic), methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) (polar, aprotic), and p-xylene (nonpolar). The results indicate that abstraction of a hydrogen atom from the methylene group...

Using thermal lens spectroscopy, we study the role of molecular structural isomers of butanol on the thermophoresis (or Soret effect) of binary mixtures of methanol in butanol. In this study, we show that the thermal lens signal due to the Soret effect changes its sign for all the different concentrations of binary mixtures of butanol with methanol except for the one containing tertiary-butanol...

Background Consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) has attracted increasing attention since it can accomplish hydrolytic enzymes production, lignocellulose degradation and microbial fermentation in one single step. Currently, biobutanol is mainly produced by mesophilic and solventogenic clostridia, such as Clostridium beijerinckii and C. acetobutylicum, which cannot directly utilize lignocellulose, an...

BACKGROUND Consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) of butanol production from cellulosic biomass is a promising strategy for cost saving compared to other processes featuring dedicated cellulase production. CBP requires microbial strains capable of hydrolyzing biomass with enzymes produced on its own with high rate and high conversion and simultaneously produce a desired product at high yield. However...