Ionic liquids as potential pretreatment agent for bioconversion of biomass to biofuels.

Abstract

Ionic liquids (ILs) have been greatly exploited as a good solvent and/or reagent with various applications because of their green properties and also their physiochemical and biological properties. One of the applications is pretreatment of biomass such as lignocellulosic biomass precedent to enzymatic hydrolysis for bioenergy production and other biomaterial production. Generally, the method collected of an IL pretreatment or recovery forwarded by hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass. Another approach came in vision in which simultaneously pretreatment process and saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass were used. However, the employment of ILs during this integrated process, within which enzymatic hydrolysis is finished within the presence of IL applied for biomass pretreatment, will simply inactivate the enzymes. Cellulases emerged as one of the important enzymes which are used to catalyze the polysaccharide from biomass and showed a higher level of stability in various ILs. Also, numerous approaches were created together with the synthesis of enzyme-compatible ILs, screening ILs-tolerant enzymes, and media engineering to boost cellulases performance. This review highlights the advancement and use of IL for the pretreatment or hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass. The structure of ILs and cellulase stabilization approaches are also discussed. From this review, this tends to powerfully believe that IL-compatible cellulase systems would eliminate the requirement to recover the regenerated biomass and cause simple, saccharification of cellulosic materials, which might be helpful in developing integrated bioprocesses.