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In cellulosic ethanol production, pretreatment of a biomass to facilitate enzymatic hydrolysis inevitably yields fermentation inhibitors such as organic acids, furans, and phenols. With representative inhibitors included in the medium at various concentrations, individually or in various combinations, ethanol production by Corynebacterium glutamicum R under growth-arrested conditions was investigated. In the presence of various inhibitors, the 62 to 100% ethanol productivity retained by the C. glutamicum R-dependent method far exceeded that retained by previously reported methods.

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Gold nanoparticles with diameters of a few tens of nanometer and a narrow size distribution were synthesized using a pulsed mixing method with a microfluidic system which consists of a Y-shaped mixing microchannel and two piezoelectric valveless micropumps. This mixing method enables control of the mixing speed of gold salts and reducing agent by changing the switching frequency of the micropumps, which was our focus to improve the particle size distribution, which is an essential parameter in gold nanoparticle synthesis. In the proposed method, the mixing time was inversely proportional to the switching frequency and the minimum mixing time was 95 ms at a switching frequency of 200 Hz. During synthesis experiments, the mean diameter of the synthesized gold nanoparticles was found to increase, and the coefficient of variation of particle size was found to decrease with decreasing mixing time. We successfully improved the coefficient of variation to less than 10% for a mean diameter of around 40 nm.

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