Abstract:Recently, there is a growing interest in efficient biomass pretreatment and saccharification processes to produce biofuels and biochemicals from renewable non-food biomass resources. In this study, glucose was produced from cellulose by immobilizing cellulase enzyme on chitosan beads which was reported to have high pH and temperature stability. The immobilized amounts of cellulase on chitosan beads linearly increased with increasing the concentrations of cellulase solution. The glucose production increased to 7.2 g/L from 1% carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) substrate when immobilized at 20% cellulase solution. The maximum specific activity was 0.37 unit/mg protein when immobilized at 8% cellulase solution. At pH 7 and 37 o C, the optimum reaction composition was 0.5 g beads/L from 1% CMC substrate. At this condition, the conversion to glucose completed at ca. 20 min.