Other ethanologenic microorganisms

Abstract

The economical production of ethanol from lignocellulosic materials needs the conversion not only of glucose, which is the sugar of preference of the best performing ethanologenic microorganisms, but also of the rest of sugars found in the fermentation broth, derived from pretreatment and enzymatic steps. This chapter summarizes recent work directed to that objective, by using different modification techniques of microorganisms. After considering the main metabolic pathways for pentoses, the second most abundant kind of fermentable sugars, a review of such modifications taking either Escherichia coli or Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a basis is presented. Although E. coli and S. cerevisiae are the most studied microorganisms through a wide range of techniques, other microorganisms are also being subject of study with the same purpose, and are briefly described at the end of this chapter.