Xylanase

Abstract: The pulp and paper industry processes huge quantities of lignocellulosic biomass every year. The technology for pulp manufacture is highly diverse, and numerous opportunities exist for the application of microbial enzymes. Historically, enzymes have found some uses in the paper industry, but these have been mainly confined to areas such as modifications of raw starch. However, a wide range of applications in the pulp and paper industry have now been identified. The use of enzymes in the pulp and paper industry has grown rapidly since the mid 1980s. While many applications of enzymes in the pulp and paper industry are still in the research and development stage, several applications have found their way into the mills in an unprecedented short period of time. Currently the most important application of enzymes is in the prebleaching of kraft pulp. Xylanase enzymes have been found to be most effective for that purpose. Xylanase prebleaching technology is now in use at several mills worldwide. This technology has been successfully transferred to full industrial scale in just a few years. The enzymatic pitch control method using lipase was put into practice in a large-scale paper-making process as a routine operation in the early 1990s and was the first case in the world in which an enzyme was successfully applied in the actual paper-making process. Improvement of pulp drainage with enzymes is practiced routinely at mill scale. Enzymatic deinking has also been successfully applied during mill trials and can be expected to expand in application as increasing amounts of newsprint must be deinked and recycled. The University of Georgia has recently opened a pilot plant for deinking of recycled paper. Pulp bleaching with a laccase mediator system has reached pilot plant stage and is expected to be commercialized soon. Enzymatic debarking, enzymatic beating, and reduction of vessel picking with enzymes are still in the R&D stage but hold great promise for reducing energy. Other enzymatic applications, i.e., removal of shives and slime, retting of flax fibers, and selective removal of xylan, are also expected to have a profound impact on the future technology of the pulp and paper-making process.

Abstract: We present a method for the quantification of xylanase-, CM-cellulase- or invertase activities of soils. It is possible to offer a simple, sensitive (2.8 μg glucose ml−1 assay mixture) and reproducible determination of the enzyme potentials of soils used by agriculture and forestry. The determination of the activity is carried out via the substrate (xylane, CM-cellulose or sucrose), the reaction is performed at pH 5.5 and 50 C. The reducing sugars are measured colorimetrically after reaction with a potassium ferric hexa-cyanide reagent. Additional investigations confirm the high stability of the soil enzyme cellulase, and further the high correlation of this enzyme, and of the xylanase, with the humus content of 7 different soils.

Abstract: We and other workers have shown that accessory enzymes, such as β-glucosidase, xylanase, and cellulase cofactors, such as GH61, can considerably enhance the hydrolysis effectiveness of cellulase cocktails when added to pretreated lignocellulosic substrates. It is generally acknowledged that, among the several factors that hamper our current ability to attain efficient lignocellulosic biomass conversion yields at low enzyme loadings, a major problem lies in our incomplete understanding of the cooperative action of the different enzymes acting on pretreated lignocellulosic substrates. The reported work assessed the interaction between cellulase and xylanase enzymes and their potential to improve the hydrolysis efficiency of various pretreated lignocellulosic substrates when added at low protein loadings. When xylanases were added to the minimum amount of cellulase enzymes required to achieve 70% cellulose hydrolysis of steam pretreated corn stover (SPCS), or used to partially replace the equivalent cellulase dose, both approaches resulted in enhanced enzymatic hydrolysis. However, the xylanase supplementation approach increased the total protein loading required to achieve significant improvements in hydrolysis (an additive effect), whereas the partial replacement of cellulases with xylanase resulted in similar improvements in hydrolysis without increasing enzyme loading (a synergistic effect). The enhancement resulting from xylanase-aided synergism was higher when enzymes were added simultaneously at the beginning of hydrolysis. This co-hydrolysis of the xylan also influenced the gross fiber characteristics (for example, fiber swelling) resulting in increased accessibility of the cellulose to the cellulase enzymes. These apparent increases in accessibility enhanced the steam pretreated corn stover digestibility, resulting in three times faster cellulose and xylan hydrolysis, a seven-fold decrease in cellulase loading and a significant increase in the hydrolysis performance of the optimized enzyme mixture. When a similar xylanase-aided enhancement strategy was assessed on other pretreated lignocellulosic substrates, equivalent increases in hydrolysis efficiency were also observed. It was apparent that the 'blocking effect' of xylan was one of the major mechanisms that limited the accessibility of the cellulase enzymes to the cellulose. However, the synergistic interaction of the xylanase and cellulase enzymes was also shown to significantly improve cellulose accessibility through increasing fiber swelling and fiber porosity and also plays a major role in enhancing enzyme accessibility.