Ionic liquids break down plant cell walls, releasing sugars for biofuels.(News)(Brief article)

These images, which demonstrate how ionic liquids break down plant material, could pave the way to better methods of producing biofuels and, ultimately, cheaper energy.

Ionic liquids--salts that are liquids rather than crystalline solids at ambient temperatures and pressures--are extremely good at dissolving lignocellulose and hydrolysing the products into sugars. But at the moment they are too expensive. It is hoped that research will lead to better and, more importantly, cheaper ionic liquids for pre-treating biomass, including weeds, agricultural waste and sawdust.

The US researchers dissolved switchgrass using EmimAc, 1-n-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate, recording the process using a variety of spectroscopic techniques (Biotechnol Bioeng doi:10.1002/ biy.22386). Their approach took advantage of the high level of natural fluorescence in plant cells, which is normally a nuisance for researchers, in the first 10 minutes, the untreated cells (A) swelled rapidly (B), due to the disruption of hydrogen bonds and after 50 minutes most of the cell wall structure had broken down (C). The biomass dissolved completely within two hours (D),

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The researchers hope that their approach could be used to rapidly screen ionic liquids, to establish whether they could be used for biomass pre-treatment, without the need for time-consuming chemical and immunological labelling.

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