ChBE Seminar - Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Lignocellulosic Biomass: A Mechanistic Modeling Approach

The Chemical and Biological Engineering Department will be hosting a seminar featuring Department of Chemical Engineering Associate Professor at Michigan Technological University, Dr. Wen Zhou. The topic of the lecture is Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Lignocellulosic Biomass: A Mechanistic Modeling Approach.

ABSTRACT

Lignocellulosic biomass has long been recognized as a renewable carbohydrate source for human energy use. It is available in large quantities in plant. In recent years, for both economic and environmental reasons, intense research efforts have been directed at the utilization of cellulose and hemicellulose to produce short-chain soluble sugar oligomers which are subsequently or concurrently metabolized by microorganisms to produce biofuels such as bioethanol.

Models have been constructed for enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic substrate to assist our understanding of this complex process. The variety of the components contained in the lignocellulosic substrate and the complexity of the enzymes acting on this heterogeneous substrate make the model constructing work difficult, especially the functionally based models which describe the mechanistic details of hydrolysis.

In this talk, I will present our recent work on probing and gaining a detailed mechanistic understanding of enzyme-substrate interactions through computational kinetic modeling, taking into account explicitly the time evolution of the random substrate morphology resulted from the hydrolytic cellulose chain fragmentation and solubilization. The effectiveness of the novel model is illustrated on comparison with real experimental measurements. Based on the model, the optimal mixture of cellulases and hemicellulase can be predicted for maximizing the conversion level of different types of hemicellulose-cellulosic substratesin an optimal time range.