Shannon Ewanick1, Renata Bura2, Richard Gustafson2, and Brian Marquardt3. (1) College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Box 352100, Seattle, WA 98195, (2) School of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Bloedel Hall 334, Seattle, WA 98195, (3) Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Box 355640, Seattle, WA 98105
As efforts to develop environmentally and socially sustainable biofuels intensify, interest in lignocellulosics has increased. While the potential exists for these feedstocks to produce a “greener” biofuel, the number of available types of biomass is overwhelming. In order to optimize land and resource use, the specific biomass chosen for a given area must provide the greatest yield of ethanol per unit area of land with minimal energy inputs. A high throughput screening system is essential to determine which feedstock will provide the highest yield of ethanol. The barriers to development of such a system lie in the fact that while the bioconversion subprocesses of pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation can be time consuming, the real bottlenecks of the screening process are the analyses of carbohydrates and other by-products. Conventional carbohydrate analysis by HPLC is lengthy, taking up to an hour per sample. Other methods of analysis cannot simultaneously measure five sugars. Fortunately, our group has developed spectroscopic methods of analysis including Raman and IR that allow complex mixtures of sugars to be rapidly and non-destructively analyzed on line in minutes per sample. In addition, a 15 minute, 5-sugar HPLC method has been developed to validate these new methods. To take full advantage of both rapid analysis techniques, high throughput hydrolysis and fermentation reactions in microwell plates have been developed. The reactants and products are directly measured without the need for lengthy sample preparation. This streamlined system of reactions and analysis allows multiple feedstocks and process conditions to be evaluated simultaneously.
