No abstract

No abstract

BioOne Complete (complete.BioOne.org) is a full-text database of 200 subscribed and open-access titles in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences published by nonprofit societies, associations, museums, institutions, and presses.

BackgroundAs a natural renewable biomass, the tea oil fruit hull (TOFH) mainly consists of lignocellulose, together with some bioactive substances. Our earlier work constructed a two-stage solvent-based process, including one aqueous ethanol organosolv extraction and an atmospheric glycerol organosolv (AGO) pretreatment, for bioprocessing of the TOFH into diverse bioproducts. However, the AGO pretreatment is not as selective as expected in removing the lignin from TOFH, resulting in the limited delignification and simultaneously high cellulose loss.ResultsIn this study, acetic acid organosolv (AAO) pretreatment was optimized with experimental design to fractionate the TOFH selectively. Alkaline hydrogen peroxide (AHP) pretreatment was used for further delignification. Results indicate that the AAO–AHP pretreatment had an extremely good selectivity at component fractionation, resulting in 92% delignification and 88% hemicellulose removal, with 87% cellulose retention. The pretreated substrate presented a remarkable enzymatic hydrolysis of 85% for 48 h at a low cellulase loading of 3 FPU/g dry mass. The hydrolyzability was correlated with the composition and structure of substrates by using scanning electron microscopy, confocal laser scanning microscopy, and X-ray diffraction.ConclusionThe mild AAO–AHP pretreatment is an environmentally benign and advantageous scheme for biorefinery of the agroforestry biomass into value-added bioproducts.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-017-0777-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

No abstract