From the Back Cover
For the development of a sustainable, industrial society to meet our demands of energy and materials, we will have to shift from our dependence on petroleum to the use of renewable resources. Bio-refineries will enable the production of bio-fuels as well as commodity chemicals (produced in excess of about one million tons per year) from biomass. These processes are favorable from a chemical point of view because the functional groups that must be introduced by costly oxidative process steps into naphtha are already present in lignocelluloic plant materials such as carbohydrates. The commodity bioproducts can be produced by microbial processes. Most of them are natural products of microorganisms, and because of their functional groups, they are extremely useful as starting materials for the chemical industry for synthesis of a wide variety of products such as polymers, surfactants, lubricants and resins.
This book provides the vision of a successful biorefinery--the lignocelluloic biomass needs to be efficiently converted to its constituent monomers, comprising mainly of sugars such as glucose, xylose, mannose and arabinose. Accordingly, the first part of the book deals with aspects crucial for the pretreatment and hydrolysis of biomass to give sugars in high yield, as well as the general aspects of bioprocessing technologies which will enable the development of biorefineries through inputs of metabolic engineering, fermentation, downstream processing and formulation. The second part of the book gives the current status and future directions of the biological processes for production of ethanol (a biofuel as well as an important commodity raw material), solvents (butanol, isobutanol, butanediols, propanediols), organic acids (lactic acid, 3-hydroxy propionic acid, fumaric acid, succinic acid and adipic acid), and amino acid (glutamic acid). The commercial production of some of these commodity bioproducts in the near future will have a far reaching effect in realizing our goal of sustainable conversion of these renewable resources and realizing the concept of biorefinery.
The book presents the state - of - the art papers by eminent scientists and engineers with practical experience of working in this exciting area of biotechnology and have published extensively in scientific journals.
The book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, graduate students and consultants in biochemical/ bioprocess engineering, industrial microbiology, bioprocess technology, metabolic engineering, environmental science and energy.
Virendra S. Bisaria is Professor in the Department of Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India. He has published more than 100 original papers, 10 reviews and 15 book chapters. He is Editor of the Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering (Elsevier) and is on the editorial boards of Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology (Wiley) and Process Biochemistry (Elsevier). He was one of the International collaborators to recommend assay procedures for cellulase and xylanase activities on behalf of Commission on Biotechnology, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. His awards include the Research Exchange Award from the Korean Society for Biotechnology and Bioengineering and fellowships from UNESCO and UNDP etc. He is Vice President of Asian Federation of Biotechnology from India.
Akihiko Kondo is Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Director of Biorefinery Center at Kobe University, Kobe, Japan. He is Team Leader, Biomass Engineering Program, RIKEN. He has published more than 330 original papers, 75 reviews and 55 book chapters. He is Editor of Journal of Biotechnology (Elsevier), Associate Editor of Biochemical Engineering Journal (Elsevier) and is on the editorial boards of Biotechnology for Biofuels (Springer), Bioresource Technology (Elsevier), Journal of Biological Engineering (Springer) and FEMS Yeast Research (Wiley). He has won numerous awards which include the Advanced Technology Award by Fuji Sankei Business and Takeda International Contributions Award by Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
