Bioprocessing of Renewable Resources to Commodity Bioproducts

This book provides the vision of a successful biorefinery—the lignocelluloic biomass needs to be efficiently converted to its constituent monomers, comprising mainly of sugars such as glucose, xylose, mannose and arabinose. Accordingly, the first part of the book deals with aspects crucial for the pretreatment and hydrolysis of biomass to give sugars in high yield, as well as the general aspects of bioprocessing technologies which will enable the development of biorefineries through inputs of metabolic engineering, fermentation, downstream processing and formulation. The second part of the book gives the current status and future directions of the biological processes for production of ethanol (a biofuel as well as an important commodity raw material), solvents (butanol, isobutanol, butanediols, propanediols), organic acids (lactic acid, 3-hydroxy propionic acid, fumaric acid, succinic acid and adipic acid), and amino acid (glutamic acid). The commercial production of some of these commodity bioproducts in the near future will have a far reaching effect in realizing our goal of sustainable conversion of these renewable resources and realizing the concept of biorefinery.