(560i) Novel Bio-Derived Solvents for Extraction of Natural Products

Sustainability is one of the global grand challenges that our modern society faces. Production of biofuels and biochemicals from renewable lignocellulosic biomass has a great potential to sustain our society with minimal greenhouse gas emissions. The major challenge in the conversion of lignocellulose is its low surface accessibility to catalysts, causing the low sugar yield and/or the use of a high amount of catalysts. Here we show the synthesis of bio-based solvents with high biomass dissolution capacity. We hypothesized that: (1) the composition of these bio-based solvents strongly affected their dissolution capacity, and (2) dissolution capacity led to an enhanced surface accessibility to catalysts. We conducted this study by evaluating 20 bio-based solvents on rice straw as our model lignocellulose. The resulting rice straw samples were enzymatically hydrolyzed using 15 mg protein/g glucan. We obtained 97% glucose yield after 72h. Our findings reveal the relationship between solvent composition, dissolution capacity, and sugar yield. This knowledge can be used to design the efficient bio-based solvents for other applications, including organic synthesis and drug formulation.