Program Overview
Goals and Objectives: The long-term goal of our Novel Pretreatment Process research initiative in the Bioprocessing and Bioproduct Engineering Laboratory at Washington State University is to develop more environmentally benign, energy efficient, and downstream conversion friendly processes for liberating sugars from lignocellulosics. Such ideal processes would require little or no chemical input, need little or moderate heat with no pressure, and produce no significant inhibitors to downstream fermentation organisms. Such systems do exist in natural organisms such as termites and white rot fungi but the rate and scale at which these systems operate are much lower than what needed for industrial applications. We thus will accomplish our goal by developing engineered systems mimicking these biological processes. Specific objectives include:
- Investigating plant cell wall deconstruction process in termite, with focus on the foregut and midgut;
- Studying enzyme systems and processes of novel white rot fungi for lignin deconstruction;
- Characterizing lignin modification, degradation and derivatives in the above processes;
- Engineering biological pretreatment processes for industrial applications.
Unique Approaches: BBEL takes a biological system engineering approach based on two fundamental believes. First, we believe that the biological systems created by nature over millions of years of evolution can be capitalized for targeted deconstruction of plan cell walls through selective cleavage and extraction of lignin. Second, we believe that continuous advances in biotechnology and engineering will make it possible to overcome the inherent weaknesses of these systems that are often viewed as being slow in degrading plant wall.
Unique Strengths: BBEL's core strengths are (i) experience, skills and know-how working on termites, (ii) experience and analytical capability on lignin degradation, (iii) unique fungal strains and process for enzyme productions, (iv) microelectrode techniques for detecting microchemical environmental conditions in termite guts, and (v) a suite of first-class analytical capabilities consisting of (1) Agilent 6530-Accurate-Mass Q-TOF LC/MS and Agilent 1290 UHPLC for profiling and identification of the lignin-derived co-products, (2) traditional wet chemistry methods for lignin functional groups determination, and lignin monomeric composition analysis/quantification (NBO and thioacidolysis) with the aid of Agilent 3243 GC MSD. (3) structural analysis of lignin proper eluciadated by solution state 1D and 2D correlation NMR techniques (HSQC, HMBC, TOCSY), (4) screening of lignin degrading genes/enzymes by proteomics (Aligent 4240 HPLC-Chip Cube), (5) transcriptome analysis in collaboration with Dr. Amit Dhingra (Roche/454 GS FLX: High Through Put Sequencing), and (6) imaging capabilities at WSU Imaging Center.
Major Accomplishments: (1) developed research platforms for using model organisms (termite, white rot fungus, borer, and bacteria); (2) discovered lignin modification characteristics of different organisms; (3) developed more specific scientific hypothesis for further investigations; (4) established domestic and international collaborations, (5) obtained a results in a number of areas that are documented in a series of publications.
Program Details
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