Sunday, May 4, 2008
1-10

Structural and Quantitative Determination of Lignin in Biomass by qPyGC-MS

Amr S. Ragab, Brian A. Jerome, Bonnie R. Hames, and Steven R. Thomas. Ceres, Inc., 1535 Rancho Conejo Blvd., Thousand Oaks, CA 91320

Our understanding of the most desirable characteristics for lignin in dedicated energy crops has been limited by our inability to accurately measure both concentration and structure of lignin in herbaceous feedstocks.   Some studies on woody biomass suggest that decreasing the lignin content enhances saccharification, but lignin contents of herbaceous materials are naturally much lower than those found in wood and may be near the limits for crop viability.   Less is known about the effect of modifying the structure of lignin, specifically, the ratio of phenolic subunits, carbon sequestration, thermochemical pretreatment, and enzymatic saccharification.  In herbaceous materials, three types of phenolic subunits are present, p-hydroxyphenol (H ) units, guaiacyl (G) units, and syringyl (S) units. This study describes the application of pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (PyGC-MS) to the quantitative measurement of lignin concentration and elucidation of lignin structure.  Analysis by this method is fast, inexpensive and accurate over a wide range of biomass materials.


Web Page: www.ceres.net/

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