The vision of the lignocellulosic biorefinery is analogous to the
existing petroleum refinery where all materials entering the refinery
are converted to a product. In order to implement this biorefinery of
the future, diverse biological, chemical and physical processes will
be needed to process the raw biomass and subsequently produce fuels
and commodity chemicals from lignocellulose derived sugars. The
ability to use fungi for the generation of products at high rates and
final yields from diverse polysaccharides and sugars is the aspect of
the biorefinery supported by this research. Challenges facing the
process description of utilization of ligoncellusic feedstocks include
the simultaneous quantification of the lignocellulose degradation and
fungal biomass growth. This talk will present work focused on this
quantification using traditional dry mass methods and image analysis
techniques. Initial estimates of parameters used in process model
equations will be presented.