Similar results were also observed for wheat straw and switchgrass samples studied by Lam et al. (2008).
In this study a portfolio approach is developed and applied to the case of the US Corn Belt, considering various types of cellulosic biomass including corn stover, wheat straw, and switchgrass.
A four-way comparison of the heat responsive transcriptomes of rice, wheat, maize and switchgrass was undertaken.
Here, economic analysis of ABE fermentation has been performed based on cellulosic (bagasse, barley straw, wheat straw, corn stover, and switchgrass) and non-cellulosic (glucose, sugarcane, corn, and sago) feedstocks, which are widely and cheaply available in agriculture based countries.
However, lignocellulosic biomasses, such as sugar cane bagasse, corn stover, rice and wheat straw, switchgrass, and poplar, are also regarded as promising starting materials for bioethanol production because they are abundant, inexpensive, renewable, and have favorable environmental properties (Adsul et al. 2011; Sánchez and Cardona 2008).
According to earlier phylogenetic analyses [ 53, 54], the nine grass plants examined in this study can be classified into three groups: Ehrhartoideae (including rice), Pooideae (including purple false brome, meadow ryegrass, barley, and wheat), and Panicoideae (including switchgrass, maize, sorghum, and sugarcane), indicating a closer relationship between Ehrhartoideae and Pooideae.
A subsequent FT-NIR rapid analysis study by Liu et al. [ 6] on corn and switchgrass (not wheat straw) gave lower relative errors of 1.99, 2.3, 10.96, 7.53, 6.65, 3.62 and 13.95% for glucan, xylan, galactan, arabinan, mannan, lignin and ash.
The results in Figures 1(b) and 1(c) show that hydrothermal pretreatment is capable of achieving high glucan (higher than 90%) and xylan (higher than 75%) recovery at moderate pretreatment conditions (180 200°C) without adding any chemicals, which is agreeing with the work done on other conventional lignocellulosic biomass including wheat straw, switchgrass, and Eucalyptus globulus wood [ 14– 16].
By January of 2009, the number of ESTs deposited in the GenBank ranged from 436,535 to 2,018,337 for rice, wheat, maize, barley, sorghum, sugarcane, and switchgrass, but only 3,087 for bamboo.
Dissolution of lignocellulosic material with ionic liquid has been shown to increase enzymatic hydrolysis rates in wheat straw [ 82], corn stover [ 83] and switchgrass [ 78].
At mild temperatures (< 100°C), treatment of grasses with NaOH induces significant solubilization of xylan and lignin relative to dicots [ 6] and thus, has been proposed as a standalone pretreatment for grasses including corn stover [ 7], wheat straw [ 8], sweet sorghum [ 9], and switchgrass [ 10].
