Lignocellulosic Biorefineries and Downstream Processing

Dear Colleagues,

The development of biofuels or bio-based chemicals utilizing sustainable biomass feedstocks has attracted worldwide interest due to changing gasoline prices, climate change, and other detrimental environmental impacts from burning fossil fuels. However, it is inevitable that certain carboxylic acids, furan aldehydes, and phenolic chemicals was formed during the pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass. These "toxic substances" will negatively impact the growth and metabolism of microorganisms, inhibit sugar uptake, and increase the cost of fermentation. Therefore, development of microorganisms with higher fermentation inhibitors tolerant and detoxification of fermentation inhibitors are the key to improve the fermentation performance of the biomass hydrolyzate, and improve the yield of fermented products.

In view of the "three-low" problems of low product concentration, low reaction rate and low yield in the biological manufacturing process, and facing the "three-high" challenges of high wastewater discharge, high energy consumption and high downstream separation and purification costs, developing advanced separation and purification technologies of fermented products to improve the quality of bio-based products, reduce production costs, and meet large-scale production needs are also the key to achieving benefits, thereby promoting the development of the lignocellulosic biorefinery industry.

This Special Issue aims to collect papers highlighting some of the excellent research being done in the field of lignocellulosic biorefineries and downstream processing. The topics of interest allow, but are not limited to:

• sustainable bioenergy;
• bio-based chemicals production from lignocellulosic derived sugars;
• lignocellulosic biorefineries;
• biomass pretreatment (lignin-first or hemicellulose-first deconstruction strategy);
• biomass hydrolysate detoxification;
• downstream processing for recovery of fermented products;
• fermentation-separation coupled integrated process.

Prof. Dr. Xiaoqing Lin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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