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The Austrian bioprocessing specialist Vogelbusch GmbH has developed a fermentation process that boosts the efficiency of bioethanol production from raw materials such as wood offcuts containing hemicellulose.
Working in partnership with the Institute of Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering at Graz University of Technology, the company says it has succeeded in extracting significantly more ethanol from hemicellulose than is possible with existing processes.
Dr Gottfried Sodeck, CEO of Vogelbusch, said the process, “Enables wood waste to be converted into ethanol far more efficiently and, as a result, it will significantly boost the development of biofuels made from lignocellulose.”
The advance is the fruit of research to optimise the process of converting the carbohydrate xylose into ethanol using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Xylose is a key intermediate in the production of bioethanol from wood waste, but production processes based on this material are usually relatively inefficient.
The research has developed an optimized strain of S. cerevisiae that generates higher levels of the enzymes that are required xylose to ethanol.
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