What Biomass-Degrading Organisms Can Teach Us about Pretreatment

Pretreatment processes remains one of the costliest unit operations in the conversion of biomass to fuels, chemicals and other products.  In addition, the choice and operation of pretreatment process has profound effects on the enzymatic conversion and fermentation steps that follow pretreatment.   In nature, many organisms possess the ability to facilely and completely degrade native biomass carbohydrates in untreated material.  Work in our lab has demonstrated that a number of organisms, including Clostridium thermocellum and Fibrobacter succinogenes appear to pretreat biomass on an  organismal level using completely novel mechanisms.  The possible mechanisms for this pretreatment will be described as well as implications for pretreatment on a macroscopic level.