Yeast-laden biomaterial design for sustained bioethanol production

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 41 KB
• Volume: 109
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0006-3592
• DOI: 10.1002/bit.24265

✦ Synopsis

Bioethanol produced by microbial fermentation of agricultural feedstock is a fast-growing source of sustainable energy. Certain yeast species are invaluable in this process, but harsh process conditions damage the yeast and prevent its recycled use, which limits bioethanol's economic sustainability. There have been efforts to shield the yeast by loading it into a hydrogel, but these efforts were often plagued by the fragility of the hydrogel system, which was usually an ionically cross-linked alginate hydrogel. The current work from Cha and coworkers presents a strategy to improve the structural durability of an alginate hydrogel with sequential ionic and covalent cross-linking reactions to introduce interpenetrating networks. The resulting hydrogel displayed marked improvement in structural integrity under external shear flow and metabolic activity to produce ethanol, compared to ionically cross-linked alginate hydrogels. The authors suggest that this new biomaterial will move biofuel engineers one step closer to use of recycled yeast for various biofuel production.