Converting cellulose into ethanol

摘要

Researchers have developed a method of processing cellulose from plants and other non-edible natural products into individual sugar molecules that then can be fermented by bacteria to produce ethanol. Plant cellulose contains long chains of useful sugars that store plenty of energy, but it is largely inaccessible due to the difficulty of breaking down cellulose. Joseph Binder and Ronald Raines (pp. 4516-4521) converted cellulose to simple sugars with a combination of an ionic liquid, acid, and chroma-tography and suggest that their technique could be developed into a large-scale industrial process to produce biofuel or other products.