Biological Pretreatment of Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch by Schizophyllum commune ENN1 without Washing and Nutrient Addition

Enis Natasha Noor Arbaain,Suraini Abd-Aziz,Ezyana Kamal Bahrin,Yoshito Ando,Mohamad Faizal Ibrahim

doi:10.3390/pr7070402

Enis Natasha Noor Arbaain, Suraini Abd-Aziz + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/pr7070402

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Abstract

Washing and drying are common steps for oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) preparation prior to pretreatment. However, the mass balance of OPEFB preparation proved a major loss of OPEFB during the washing and drying steps. An indigenous fungus, Schizophyllum commune ENN1 was used for delignification of unwashed OPEFB in biological pretreatment without nutrient addition. S. commune ENN1 achieved a maximum lignin removal of 53.8% after 14 days of biological pretreatment of unwashed OPEFB. S. commune ENN1 was able to grow on unwashed OPEFB during biological pretreatment at 55% of moisture content and 5% of oil residue. The highest amount of reducing sugars obtained from OPEFB pretreated by S. commune ENN1 was 230.4 ± 0.19 mg/g with 54% of hydrolysis yield at 96 h. In comparison, the sugar yield of OPEFB pretreated by Phanerochaete chrysosporium was 101.2 ± 0.04 mg/g. This study showed that S. commune ENN1 was feasible to remove lignin of OPEFB through biological pretreatment for enzymatic saccharification without washing and addition of nutrients.

Highlights

The rapid expansion of the Malaysian palm oil industry has significantly increased the total land area of oil palm plantation from 3.4 million hectares in 2000 to 4.7 million hectares in 2009 and reached5.8 million hectares in 2017 [1]
An indigenous fungus identified as Schizophyllum commune ENN1 was obtained from a culture collection of Biorefinery Complex, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Selangor, Malaysia
The results proved that S. commune ENNI is a good candidate to pretreat oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) for the enzymatic saccharification process without the initial washing step to remove excess oil residues

Summary

Introduction

5.8 million hectares in 2017 [1] This scenario has accelerated the accumulation of biomass from palm oil mills and upsurges environmental issues. About 80 million tonnes of fresh fruit bunch (FFB) is processed in 406 palm oil mills and generating about 18 million tonnes of oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) [2]. The fruitlets from the FFB is subjected to different processes, including steam sterilisation, stripping, extraction and purification for oil extraction [3]. OPEFB is one of the biomass produced after oil palm fruitlets are stripped from the FFB [4]. Due to the steam sterilisation process, the untreated OPEFB contains approximately 60% of moisture content, which makes it very favourable to be used as direct fermentation feedstock [5]

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