High-performance liquid chromatography method for simultaneous determination of aliphatic acid, aromatic acid and neutral degradation products in biomass pretreatment hydrolysates

A variety of degradation products are produced upon dilute acid pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass. Within this larger construct, organic acids, phenols and aromatic aldehydes represent important compound classes to investigate due to increasing evidence of their inhibitory effect on fermentative microorganisms. An analytical extraction procedure is presented, enabling isolation of potential analytes away from alternative products in biomass hydrolysates. Additionally, a reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method has been developed and validated, affording simultaneous separation and quantitative determination of 32 potential analytes in water with UV detection at 210 nm. The method was subsequently employed to quantify a variety of aliphatic acid, aromatic acid, aldehyde and phenolic degradation products in a corn-stover hydrolysate at concentration levels ranging from 0.02 to 41 mM.