Bioprocessing of Renewable Resources to Commodity Bioproducts

For the development of a sustainable, industrial society to meet our demands of energy and materials, we will have to shift from our dependence on petroleum to the use of renewable resources. Bio–refineries will enable the production of bio–fuels as well as commodity chemicals (produced in excess of about one million tons per year) from biomass. These processes are favorable from a chemical point of view because the functional groups that must be introduced by costly oxidative process steps into naphtha are already present in lignocelluloic plant materials such as carbohydrates. The commodity bioproducts can be produced by microbial processes. Most of them are natural products of microorganisms, and because of their functional groups, they are extremely useful as starting materials for the chemical industry for synthesis of a wide variety of products such as polymers, surfactants, lubricants and resins. This book provides the vision of a successful biorefinery—the lignocelluloic biomass needs to be efficiently converted to its constituent monomers, comprising mainly of sugars such as glucose, xylose, mannose and arabinose. Accordingly, the first part of the book deals with aspects crucial for the pretreatment and hydrolysis of biomass to give sugars in high yield, as well as the general aspects of bioprocessing technologies which will enable the development of biorefineries through inputs of metabolic engineering, fermentation, downstream processing and formulation. The second part of the book gives the current status and future directions of the biological processes for production of ethanol (a biofuel as well as an important commodity raw material), solvents (butanol, isobutanol, butanediols, propanediols), organic acids (lactic acid, 3–hydroxy propionic acid, fumaric acid, succinic acid and adipic acid), and amino acid (glutamic acid). The commercial production of some of these commodity bioproducts in the near future will have a far reaching effect in realizing our goal of sustainable conversion of these renewable resources and realizing the concept of biorefinery. The book presents the state – of – the art papers by eminent scientists and engineers with practical experience of working in this exciting area of biotechnology and have published extensively in scientific journals. The book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, graduate students and consultants in biochemical/ bioprocess engineering, industrial microbiology, bioprocess technology, metabolic engineering, environmental science and energy.