Integration of renewable deep eutectic solvent with plant genetic engineering to achieve a closed-loop biorefinery

Abstract

The modern lignocellulosic biorefinery strives to develop new processes and products for achieving a sustainable energy future. Although renewable fuels from lignocellulosic biomass have proven to be alternatives for fossil fuels, innovative technologies are still required to build economically viable processes for converting biomass to fuels and chemicals. In this work, we report an integrated biomass processing that uses a renewable deep eutectic solvent synthesized from lignin-derived phenolic aldehydes for the pretreatment of CAD down-regulated biomass. Novel DESs tested in this work showed their potential as solvents for biomass pretreatment in terms of lignin removal and sugar release after enzymatic saccharification. Also, CAD down-regulated biomass has the potential to produce phenolic aldehydes (e.g. vanillin, 4-hydroxybenzaldehyde, etc.), which can be directly used for the DES synthesis. We believe that biomass processes utilizing DESs directly from biomass could lower costs by achieving the closed-loop biorefinery.