Bioethanol production from sugarcane bagasse by simultaneous sacarification and fermentation using Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

Sugarcane bagasse (SCB) is most abundant agricultural wastes in the world. It is an attractive feedstock for the large-scale biological production of bioethanol. However, the limitation in bagase use is its high degree of complexity because of its mixed composition of extremely inhomogeneous fibers. Therefore, ethanol production from bagase is often complex, with three main steps, i.e pretreatment, sacharification, and fermentation. Here we used alkali pretreatment using delignification reactor with NaOH 1N and 1.5 bar for 2 hours. Followed by Simultaneous Sacarification and Fermentation (SSF) using Saccharomyces cerevisiae in addition of cellulase and β-glucosidase enzyme. We found that the alkaline pretreatment can decrease cellulose crystallinity, decrease lignin content up to 84.83% and increased cellulose content up to 74.29%. SSF using cellulase enzymes and combination of cellulase enzymes and β-glucosidase derived bioethanol levels respectively 5.87±0.78% and 6.83±0.07%. In conclusion these results strongly suggest that addition of β-glucosidase enzyme on alkali-pretreated bagasse increased the bioethanol production.