Fungal pretreatment of agricultural residues for bioethanol production

The biological pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of ethanol is an environmentally friendly process that needs to be evaluated with different feedstocks in order to avoid dependence on a single feedstock. In this study, four agricultural residues (corn stover, barley straw, corncob and wheat straw), selected in terms of their composition and geographic availability, were pretreated using the white-rot fungus Irpex lacteus. After the fungal pretreatment, the biggest reduction in lignin content (45.8 ± 3.5%), lowest sugars consumption (11.5 ± 1.4%) and highest lignin selectivity removal (2.1 ± 0.15) were achieved with corn stover. Moreover, total holocellulose digestibility was significantly increased after the biological pretreatment with all the substrates (37–103%), excepting corncob. In this study, fungal pretreatment was successfully applied to three of the most common agricultural residues available in Europe for producing ethanol, demonstrating that it is capable of handling feedstocks of variable origin.