BACKGROUND Lignocellulosic biomass from softwood represents a valuable resource for the production of biofuels and bio-based materials as alternatives to traditional pulp and paper products. Hemicelluloses constitute an extremely heterogeneous fraction of the plant cell wall, as their molecular structures involve multiple monosaccharide components, glycosidic linkages, and decoration patterns. ...

There is social, environmental and increasing economic pressure on the industrial sector to substitute non-renewable resources with renewable ones as the increasing World population is exponentially depleting the fossil fuel supplies of the Earth. Each year about 260 million tons of plastics are produced from crude oil and most of it ends up as waste. Producing biodegradable plastics from renew...

BACKGROUND The metagenomic analysis of gut microbiomes has emerged as a powerful strategy for the identification of biomass-degrading enzymes, which will be no doubt useful for the development of advanced biorefining processes. In the present study, we have performed a functional metagenomic analysis on comb and gut microbiomes associated with the fungus-growing termite, Pseudacanthotermes mili...

In current models of the organization of polymers in primary cell walls of plants it is proposed that cellulosic microfibrils are embedded in a matrix of intenvoven noncellulosic polysaccharides and proteins (Talbott and Ray, 1992; Carpita and Gibeaut, 1993). There is good evidence that the microfibril surfaces are coated with noncellulosic polysaccharides such as xyloglucans and, possibly, ara...

Polysaccharides that make up plant lignocellulosic biomass can be broken down to produce a range of sugars that subsequently can be used in establishing a biorefinery. These raw materials would constitute a new industrial platform, which is both sustainable and carbon neutral, to replace the current dependency on fossil fuel. The recalcitrance to deconstruction observed in lignocellulosic mater...

Background: Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) is a C4 perennial prairie grass and a dedicated feedstock for lignocellulosic biofuels. Saccharification and biofuel yields are inhibited by the plant cell wall's natural recalcitrance against enzymatic degradation. Plant hemicellulose polysaccharides such as arabinoxylans structurally support and cross-link other cell wall polymers. Grasses predomi...

The objective of these studies was to determine if dietary enzymes increase the digestibility of nutrients bound by nonstarch polysaccharides, such as arabinoxylans, or phytate in wheat millrun. Effects of millrun inclusion rates (20 or 40%), xylanase (0 or 4,375 units/kg of feed), and phytase (0 or 500 phytase units/kg of feed) on nutrient digestibility and growth performance were investigated...

L-Arabinose sugar residues are relatively abundant in plants and are found mainly in arabinan polysaccharides and in other arabinose-containing polysaccharides such as arabinoxylans and pectic arabinogalactans. The majority of the arabinose units in plants are present in the furanose form and only a small fraction of them are present in the pyranose form. The L-arabinan-utilization system in Ge...

Cereal Chem. 90(3):240–248 Arabinoxylans (AX), xylanase, and xylanase inhibitors have an important role in many cereal food processing applications. The effects of genotype, growing location, and their interaction (G × L) on AX, apparent xylanase activity, and apparent xylanase inhibition activity of Triticum aestivum xylanase inhibitor (TAXI) and xylanase inhibiting protein (XIP) were investig...

This article is a Commentary on Calderini et al. (2021), 230: 629-640. ‘What α-expansin and how does its expression increase grain size without triggering compensatory reduction in number?’ Expansin proteins were first discovered as catalysts of ‘acid growth’ (McQueen-Mason al., 1992), the pH-dependent cell growth wall extensibility that occurs under many circumstances, classically case auxin-s...