Microbial and Bioinformatics Approach in Biofuel Production

Abstract

AbstractDue to the increasing world population and ever developing technology, the need and demand for energy are increasing day by day. In parallel with this, the tendency to use renewable alternative energy sources instead of limited fossil fuel reserves is increasing worldwide. Lignocellulosic biomasses which are abundant in nature with renewable energy potential are preferred in biofuel production. These raw biomaterials are transformed into forms that can be used in biofuel production processes by various pretreatment techniques. The physical and chemical methods commonly used in the pretreatment of the substrate have some limitations. However, microbial methods for hydrolysis of biomass are quite remarkable. In this study, we focused on the pretreatment of biomass and microbial enzymes used in biofuel production process.Furthermore, due to the increasing applications of molecular interaction simulations in this field, at a small scale, we demonstrate how the molecular docking technique is able to reveal the interactions between the xylanase enzyme (both wild type and mutant) isolated from Thermotoga petrophila RKU-1 and its substrate, xylobiose. In conclusion, molecular interaction simulations (molecular docking and molecular dynamics) contribute to the fields of bioengineering and genetics as powerful bioinformatics tools and offer a unique opportunity to study, at the atomic level, how enzyme-substrate affinity change as a result of induced mutations in the protein structure.KeywordsBiofuelBiomass pretreatmentMicrobial enzymesCocktail enzymesBinding free energyMolecular dockingMolecular dynamics