Elucidating the mechanisms of enhanced lignin bioconversion by an alkali sterilization strategy

Zhao, Zhi-Min; Zhang, Shuyang; Meng, Xianzhi; Pu, Yunqiao Joseph; Liu, Zhi-Hua; Ledford, William K.; Kilbey, II, S. Michael; Li, Bing-Zhi; Ragauskas, Arthur J.

doi:10.1039/d1gc00911g

Title: Elucidating the mechanisms of enhanced lignin bioconversion by an alkali sterilization strategy

Journal Article · Wed May 19 00:00:00 UTC 2021 · Green Chemistry

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/d1gc00911g · OSTI ID:1818684

Zhao, Zhi-Min ^[1]; Zhang, Shuyang ^[2];

^[2];

^[3]; Liu, Zhi-Hua ^[4]; Ledford, William K. ^[2];

^[2];

^[4];

^[5]

Inner Mongolia Univ., Hohhot (China); Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Tianjin Univ. (China)
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States); Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Univ. of Tennessee Inst. of Agriculture, Knoxville, TN (United States)

Biological lignin valorization represents an emerging green approach to upgrade lignin for sustainable and economic biorefineries. However, lignin generally exhibits poor water solubility and inhomogeneous distribution in an aqueous medium, significantly limiting its bioconversion efficiency. Herein, we develop a novel alkali sterilization strategy to effectively enhance the dispersion and fermentation performance of lignin substrates. The colloidal particle size and molecular structure variations of lignin during the sterilization were thoroughly investigated to reveal the mechanisms of enhanced fermentation performance. Results showed that alkali sterilization achieved a completely aseptic effect when mixing lignin medium at an initial pH of 12.7 for 24 h. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) analysis demonstrated that the hydrodynamic volume of colloidal lignin particles decreased by 96.3% by alkali sterilization compared with the conventional thermal sterilization. Moreover, lignin characterizations by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and gel permeation chromatography (GPC) suggested that alkali sterilization modified the lignin molecular structure by generating 50% more hydrophilic carboxyl groups, reducing the weight-average molecular weight (M_w) by 23.0%, and narrowing the molar-mass dispersity (D_M) by 23.8%. The generation of lignin substrates with more uniform distribution and lower molecular weight improved Rhodococcus opacus PD630 cell growth and metabolism. Microbial cell amount, lignin degradation, and lipid production in alkali sterilized medium increased by 309%, 30.3%, and 48.3%, respectively, compared to those in thermally sterilized medium. These results clearly demonstrated that alkali sterilization dramatically improved the lignin bioconversion performance. Furthermore, this work presents a facile and effective sterilization strategy to overcome inhomogeneous lignin distribution in aqueous fermentation media, showing great potentials as a platform technique for promoting biological lignin valorization.

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Research Organization:: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)

Grant/Contract Number:: AC05-00OR22725

OSTI ID:: 1818684

Journal Information:: Green Chemistry, Journal Name: Green Chemistry Journal Issue: 13 Vol. 23; ISSN 1463-9262

Publisher:: Royal Society of ChemistryCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Additional file 2 of Understanding of bacterial lignin extracellular degradation mechanisms by Pseudomonas putida KT2440 via secretomic analysis Xu, Zhangyang; Peng, Bo; Kitata, Reta Birhanu figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21443760.v1	dataset	January 2022

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