Title: an Extractive Fermentation Process for Enhanced Acetate Production from Biomass

Conventional fermentation technologies are limited due to low reactor productivity, low product yield, and low product concentration mainly due to product inhibition. There are several ways of improving the overall behavior of a biotechnological process. The cells can be modified so that the product is excreted prior to reaching inhibiting concentrations. Furthermore, a selective mutation of the cells can be employed to eliminate points of metabolic pathways sensitive to feedback inhibition. Also, the concentration of an enzyme that is of critical importance to the whole metabolic pathway can be amplified. Another approach to improving the productivity of a process is to increase the catalyst density in the reactor by immobilization or catalyst recycling. Because of the high cell density, the microorganism has a high acid tolerance, thus, the conversion of a substrate to a major product is still possible even up to a very high acid end product concentration accumulated in the fermentation broth.