Efficient utilization of hydrolysates from steam-exploded gardening residues for lactic acid production by optimization of enzyme addition and pH control

Abstract

The expansion of urban green areas has boosted the accumulation of gardening lignocellulosic residues that could be potentially used to produce platform chemicals like lactic acid. However, when using lignocelluloses, pretreatment step, such as steam explosion, is often needed to favour sugar release. Considering that the conversion of glucose from cellulose has been widely addressed, this work is focused on the valorisation of the steam-exploded gardening liquid fraction rich in hemicellulosic sugars. Since oligomeric sugars are usually solubilized during steam explosion, an enzymatic hydrolysis step was required in some cases to increase the monosaccharides content. Although the presence of inhibitors released during pretreatment (e.g. formic acid) hindered hydrolysis yields, the addition of hemicellulases and the enzyme dosage optimization resulted in 85%, 89% and 95% of glucose, xylose and arabinose release from soluble oligomers, respectively. Lactobacillus pentosus CECT4023T was used for lactic acid fermentation of C6 and C5 sugars from the hydrolysate with the highest sugars concentration, that did not require enzymatic hydrolysis. Xylose consumption was hampered due to the inhibitory effect of acids that produced pH drop. Different pH control systems were applied and automatic NaOH addition in bioreactor resulted in 21 g L^-1 of lactic acid (95% of the maximum theoretical yield) that implied 44% increase in lactic acid production when compared with flask fermentation. These results provide new insights for the valorisation of emerging lignocellulosic materials like gardening residues into high added-value products.

Keywords: Enzymatic hydrolysis; Gardening hydrolysate; Inhibitors; Lactic acid; pH control.