Trends in bioconversion of lignocellulose: Biofuels, platform chemicals & biorefinery concept

Bioconversion of renewable lignocellulosic biomass to biofuel and value added products are globally gaining significant prominence. Market forces demonstrate a drive towards products benign to natural environment increasing the importance of renewable materials. The development of second generation bioethanol from lignocellulosic biomass serves many advantages from both energy and environmental point of views. Biomass an inexpensive feedstock considered sustainable and renewable, is an option with the potential to replace a wide diversity of fossil based products within the energy sector; heat, power, fuels, materials and chemicals. Lignocellulose is a major structural component of woody and non-woody plants and consists of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The effective utilization of all the three components would play a significant role in the economic viability of cellulosic ethanol. Biomass conversion process involves five major steps, choice of suitable biomass, effective pretreatment, production of saccharolytic enzymes-cellulases and hemicellulases, fermentation of hexoses and pentoses and downstream processing. Within the context of production of fuels from biomass, pretreatment has come to denote processes by which cellulosic biomass is made amenable to the action of hydrolytic enzymes. The limited effectiveness of current enzymatic process on lignocellulose is thought to be due to the relative difficulties in pretreating the feedstocks. The present review is a comprehensive state of the art describing the advancement in recent pretreaments, metabolic engineering approaches with special emphasis on the latest developments in consolidated biomass processing, current global scenario of bioethanol pilot plants and biorefinery concept for the production of biofuels and bioproducts. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.