The discovery could greatly benefit the biofuels industry and provide an alternative source of energy.
researchers in UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering and biological engineering professor Michelle O’Malley’s lab proved that a group of anaerobic fungi – Neocallimastigomycetes – are up to the task.
Additionally, she said, lignin has properties that make the plant resistant to physical degradation by enzymes and pathogens. “We’ve never had to extract the lignin out of there because the fungi we work with are just as happy to extract the cellulose and hemicellulose on their own,” she said. “So the fact that these fungi could grow on non-pretreated plant biomass was always a feature that was unique and unusual, and we hypothesized that they must have a way of moving the lignin around.”
“This is really a paradigm shift in terms of how people think about the fate of lignin in the absence of oxygen,” O’Malley said. “You could extend this to understand what happens to lignin in a compost pile, in an anaerobic digester, or in very deep environments where no oxygen is available. It pushes our understanding of what happens to biomass in these environments and alters our perception of what’s possible and the chemistry of what’s happening there.
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