11-23: Advances in high throughput screening of biomass recalcitrance

Previous work on high throughput screening of biomass recalcitrance enabled rapid screening of thousands of different biomass samples for susceptibility to thermochemical pretreatment and subsequent enzyme hydrolysis.  Thousands of data points were generated in dozens of sample sets, however the methodology suffered from cumulative error from various steps in the process. Advances have been made in the overall process resulting in improved conversion, greater reproducibility, and better delineation of differences between samples.  Cumulatively, improvements in plate reactor metallurgy, preparation of control and sample biomass, species-specific pretreatment conditions, sugar standard curve generation, assay timing, evaporation control, and enzymatic hydrolysis parameters have reduced coefficients of variation to below 5% for sample replicates.  These hardware and methodology changes have also improved plate-to-plate variation of control biomass recalcitrance and improved confidence in sugar release differences between samples.