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. 2015 Apr 24;8(8):1317-22.
doi: 10.1002/cssc.201403418. Epub 2015 Mar 17.

Solvent-enabled nonenyzmatic sugar production from biomass for chemical and biological upgrading

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Solvent-enabled nonenyzmatic sugar production from biomass for chemical and biological upgrading

Jeremy S Luterbacher et al. ChemSusChem. .

Abstract

We recently reported a nonenzymatic biomass deconstruction process for producing carbohydrates using homogeneous mixtures of γ-valerolactone (GVL) and water as a solvent. A key step in this process is the separation of the GVL from the aqueous phase, enabling GVL recycling and the production of a concentrated aqueous carbohydrate solution. In this study, we demonstrate that phenolic solvents-sec-butylphenol, nonylphenol, and lignin-derived propyl guaiacol-are effective at separating GVL from the aqueous phase using only small amounts of solvent (0.5 g per g of the original water, GVL, and sugar hydrolysate). Furthermore, using nonylphenol, we produced a hydrolysate that supported robust growth and high yields of ethanol (0.49 g EtOH per g glucose) at an industrially relevant concentration (50.8 g L(-1) EtOH). These results suggest that using phenolic solvents could be an interesting solution for separating and/or detoxifying aqueous carbohydrate solutions produced using GVL-based biomass deconstruction processes.

Keywords: biomass; biorefinery; catalysis; sugars; valerolactone.

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