Thursday, May 5, 2011: 2:00 PM
Grand Ballroom B, 2nd fl (Sheraton Seattle)
Lignocellulosic feedstocks are considered to be of great economic and environmental significance for biotechnological production processes. For cost-effective and efficient industrial processes, complete and fast conversion of all sugars derived from feedstocks is required. One of the main challenges emerging from the use of lignocellulosics for ethanol production by Saccharomyces cerevisiae is efficient fermentation of xylose and arabinose, as these sugars cannot be used by wild-type S. cerevisiae strains. DSM now has an industrial advanced yeast strain that has been genetically engineered to enable the conversion of the most abundant biomass sugars glucose, xylose, arabinose, galactose and mannose at high yield to ethanol. This paper describes work aimed at accelerating the utilization of C5-sugars by this engineered strain. For this purpose an evolutionary engineering strategy was followed, named sequential batch reactors (SBR) cultivation. Finally, the results with respect to the sugars’ fermentation performance in lignocellulosic hydrolysates at economically relevant dry matter level will be presented.