(86a) Biofuel and Biochemical Productions from Mixed Sugars Derived from Lignocellulosic Biomass by the RITE Bioprocess

In order to combat global warming and find alternatives to the increasing scarce fossil fuel resources, the world's attention is currently focused on biofuel and commodity chemicals from renewable biomass resources.

In the U.S., developing new technologies based on the biorefinery concept is a strongly promoted national policy which has resulted in a significant increase in production of bio-ethanol, a representative product of the biorefinery concept. Having said that, most feedstocks for current ethanol production processes are food crops, and bio-ethanol production has lately been blamed for the current high food prices. There is, therefore, a growing need to use "soft-biomass" obtained from non-food crops as well as inedible parts of food crops, as the demand for the ethanol production increases.

We developed the "RITE-bioprocess" to produce ethanol from soft-biomass in collaboration with Honda R&D. The RITE-bioprocess utilizes Corynebacterium glutamicum, which is widely used in industrial production of amino acids. The process is based on a new concept that fundamentally resolved the technological problems of the existing bioprocesses. We constructed ethanologenic C. glutamicum strains to demonstrate ethanol production and using resultant strains, various substances have been produced at high volumetric productivity with cells packed in a reactor to high density under growth-arrested conditions. In addition, we have improved the ethanol production process from mixed sugars containing hexose and pentose sugars derived from lignocellulosic biomass. In this presentation, trends in the technological developments made in the biofuel production process and our current research into biofuel production for industrialization will be discussed.