A STUDY OF THE INHIBITION OF CELLULASES BY LIGNIN FRAGMENTS

Wood is a renewable resource and a potential feed stock to produce useful chemicals. The enzymatic hydrolysis of wood, which is known as bioconversion of wood for sugars has received a great deal of attention in recent years because the most widely used process, chemical hydrolysis, has several disadvantages. The bioconversion offers a range of advantages for the production of useful sugars. This process produces high yields, minimal byproduct formations, low energy requirements, mild operating conditions, and also, it does not need to be neutralized prior to the downstream process. For all these reasons the bioconversion is environmentally benign.

 Some successful research has been done to investigate the ability of processing wood into useful sugars using enzymes to find out a reasonable solution for the shortcomings of the chemical processing method. Some literature suggests that enzymes are deactivated by some lignin degradation products (lignin is one of the three major structural components in wood); and also some literature proposes that some of these products activate the enzyme during this process. Once the effect of these molecules to perform bioconversion successfully is identified, the treatments can be applied to neutralize or remove the harmful products from the medium. There is no more literature available to identify these compounds. The objective of this research is to identify the effect of some of these selected compounds on the enzyme, cellulase.