High-throughput Pretreatment and Hydrolysis Systems for Screening Biomass Species in Aqueous Pretreatment of Plant Biomass

The primary barrier to low-cost biological conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to renewable fuels and chemicals is plant recalcitrance, that is to say, resistance of cell walls to deconstruction by enzymes or microbes [1,2]. However, the discovery and use of biomass species with reduced recalcitrance, when combined with optimized pretreatment processes and enzyme mixtures, could potentially improve the commercial viability of fuels and chemicals production from lignocellulosic biomass [3,4]. Unfortunately, the current understanding of biomass recalcitrance is limited, making it difficult to rationally select superior plant species without prior sugar release testing. As a result, there is a need to generate and screen a large variety of plants to identify those that exhibit both superior and sub-par sugar release. To this end, there are two central methodologies in generating and screening plants: (1) generation of mutants to see what effect targeted modifications have and (2) evaluation of natural variants to identify outliers for further characterization, in order to relate observed differences in behavior to structural features and biomass characteristics.