BACKGROUND A major hindrance to the development of high yielding biofuel feedstocks is the ability to rapidly assess large populations for fermentable sugar yields. Whilst recent advances have outlined methods for the rapid assessment of biomass saccharification efficiency, none take into account the total biomass, or the soluble sugar fraction of the plant. Here we present a holistic high-thro...

BACKGROUND Environmental crisis and concerns for energy security have made the research for renewable fuels that will substitute the usage of fossil fuels an important priority. Biodiesel is a potential substitute for petroleum, but its feasibility is hindered by the utilization of edible vegetable oil as raw material, which is responsible for a large fraction of the production cost and fosters...

Different agricultural residues were considered in this study for their ability to support cellulolytic enzyme production by Aspergillus niger. A total of eleven agricultural residues including finger millet hulls, sorghum hulls, soybean hulls, groundnut husk, banana peels, corn stalk, cassava peels, sugarcane bagasse, saw dust, rice straw and sheanut cake were subjected to three pretreatment (...

In this study, a novel succinic acid producing bacterium was isolated from cow bovine rumen. Two bacteria’s are found to give better results for the production of succinic acid from the isolated colonies. Different synthetic carbon sources such as glucose, sucrose, fructose, dextrose, starch and cellulose and different crude carbon sources such as rice straw, sorghum stalk, baggase and sugar mi...

The production of lactic acid from fossil fuel is now widely accepted as unsustainable due to depleting resources and the accumulation of environmentally hazardous chemicals. Cheap raw material is one of the key inputs to cost effective production of Lactic acid. This paper reviews current research in lactic acid fermentation processes, bio-residue availability in Ghana and potential utilizatio...

In this study, forty-two fungi from soil were isolated and tested for their carboxymethyl cellulase (CMCase) and xylanase activities. From all isolates, the fungal isolate FR60, which was identified as Aspergillus aculeatus Iizuka, showed high activities in both CMCase and xylanase with 517 mU/mg protein and 550 mU/mg protein, respectively. The crude enzyme from A. aculeatus Iizuka FR60 could h...

Sweet, grain, and dual-purpose sorghums differ in a number of important traits, including biomass production, total solutes the stem juice, sugar accumulation across stem. Ten hybrids, two sweet genotypes, grain landraces were characterized under temperate environmental conditions to determine their potential for bioethanol production. Five sorghum hybrids (Ganymed, Hannibal, Tarzan, Merlin, Ze...

Exploring the natural genetic variability and its exploitation for improved Nitrogen Use Efficiency (NUE) in sorghum is one of primary goals modern crop improvement programs. The integrated strategies include high-throughput phenotyping, next generation sequencing (NGS)-based genotyping technologies, a priori selected candidate gene studies that help understand detailed physiological molecular ...