CHARACTERIZATION OF KEY PARAMETERS FOR BIOTECHNOLOGICAL LIGNOCELLULOSE CONVERSION ASSESSED BY FT-NIR SPECTROSCOPY. PART I: QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF PRETREATED STRAW

• Main Authors: Chularat Krongtaew, Kurt Messner, Thomas Ters, Karin Fackler
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: North Carolina State University 2010-08-01
• Series: BioResources
• Subjects: Lignocellulose characterization; Wheat and oat straw; Mild acidic and alkaline peroxide pre-treatments; Fourier-transform near infrared spectroscopy (FT-NIR); Principal component analysis (PCA); Multivariate data analysis; Qualitative discriminant analysi
• Online Access: http://ojs.cnr.ncsu.edu/index.php/BioRes/article/viewFile/BioRes_05_4_2063_Krongtaew_MTF_Pt1_Char_Param_Lignocell_Conver_Qual_FTIR/699

Wheat straw (Triticum aestivum L.) and oat straw (Avena sativa L.) were subjected to acid and alkaline pre-treatments partly in combination with hydrogen peroxide. The aim was to remove lignin and increase the accessibility of the polysaccharides to enzymatic digestion. Accessibility was evaluated by digestion with a cell wall degrading enzyme complex to yield reducing sugars that may serve as precursor substrates for biofuels or building block chemicals. Changes in lignin, hemicelluloses, as well as amorphous, semi-crystalline, and crystalline regions of cellulose moieties of pretreated straw were efficiently characterized by Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) reflectance spectroscopy. These alterations of the chemical structure of straw after different pre-treatment methods were powerfully differentiated by principal component analysis (PCA). Characteristics of the different samples owing to the different pre-treatment methods could be clustered from the PCA loadings spectra.