Short Communication Hydrolysis of cellulose derived from steam exploded bagasse by Penicillium cellulases: Comparison with commercial cellulase Rajkumar Singh a , A.J. Varma b , R. Seeta Laxman a, * , Mala Rao a, * a Biochemical Sciences Division, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune 411008, India b Polymer Sciences and Engineering Division, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune 411008, India article info Article history: Received 15 May 2009 Received in revised form 20 July 2009 Accepted 21 July 2009 Available online 15 August 2009 Keywords: Sugarcane bagasse Penicillium cellulase High b-glucosidase Enzymatic hydrolysis Accellerase TM 1000 abstract A complete cellulase from Penicillium pinophilum was evaluated for the hydrolysis of a-cellulose derived from steam exploded sugarcane bagasse and other cellulosic substrates. a-Cellulose at 1% substrate con- centration was completely hydrolyzed by Penicillium cellulase within 3 h wherein at 10% the hydrolysis was 100% within 24 h with an enzyme loading of 10 FPU/g. The hydrolysate yielded glucose as major end product as analyzed by HPLC. Under similar conditions, hydrolysis of Sigmacell (microcrystalline cellu- lose), CP-123 (pulverized cellulose powder) and ball milled Solka Floc were 42%, 56% and 52%, respec- tively. Further the hydrolysis performance of Penicillium sp. cellulase is compared with Trichoderma reesei cellulase (Accellerase TM 1000) from Genencore. The kinetics of hydrolysis with respect to enzyme and substrate concentration will be presented. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Lignocellulosic biomasses are considered as significant source for the generation of sugar streams, organic products and fuel/eth- anol. Cellulases, a group of enzymes which catalyze the hydrolysis of cellulose are considered as a potential tool for industrial sac- charification of biomass. Sugarcane bagasse a byproduct of sugar- cane industry is the most abundant lignocellulosic feed stock in India, second after Brazil, the largest producer with 27% of total global production. Approximately 179 million tons of bagasse is annually produced in India, cultivated on 4.3 million hectare area with the yield of 41498.0 kg/hectare (Kapoor et al., 2006). Most of the bagasse is burnt for generating power for boilers and is used as a fuel directly by sugar industry (Pandey et al., 2000). Within the context of production of fuels from biomass, pre- treatment has come to denote as one of the processes necessary to render cellulosic biomass susceptible to the action of cellulases. Several pretreatment processes have been developed for the pre- treatment of sugarcane bagasse including steam explosion, liquid hot water process, acid hydrolysis, alkali pretreatment and wet oxidation. Few reports are available on the steam explosion pro- cess with minor modifications for the pretreatment of sugarcane bagasse (Hendriks and Zeeman, 2009). In principle steam explosion (SE) is one of the attractive pretreatment methods that can cause disintegration of the material, thereby creating a large surface area on which cellulase enzyme complex can act upon. Simultaneously hemicellulose is separated during the steam explosion process thereby improving the accessibility to the enzymes and enhance- ment of the over all lignocellulose degradation (Wei et al., 2006). In the current report, steam explosion a proprietary process devel- oped at National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) is used as a pretreat- ment procedure for sugar cane bagasse. The NCL process is based on steam explosion of sugar cane bagasse to separate lignin, cellu- lose and hemicellulose along with a relevant downstream process- ing (patent application 1893 DEL 2007, 27th Aug) to yield pure cellulose, lignin and hemicellulosic hydrolysate as the other products. Trichoderma sp. is an extensively studied organism for cellulase production and hydrolysis of differently pretreated diverse ligno- celluloses (Tabka et al., 2006). After screening for a large number of cultures at NCL, a Penicillium strain has been selected as a source of complete cellulase with high b-glucosidase activity. The present paper reports the hydrolysis of cellulose derived from sugarcane bagasse by steam explosion and other cellulosic substrates such as CP-123, Sigmacell and Solka Floc by Penicillium cellulase. Further the comparison of hydrolysis performance of Penicillium cellulase with commercial cellulase (Accellerase TM 1000) from genetically modified Trichoderma reesei will also described. By virtue of the high b-glucosidase activity in the Penicillium cellulase complex, the hydrolysis yielded glucose as the major end product. 0960-8524/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2009.07.060 * Corresponding authors. Tel.: +91 20 25902720; fax: +91 20 25902648 (R. Seeta Laxman), tel.: +91 20 25902228 (M. Rao). E-mail addresses: r.seeta@ncl.res.in (R. Seeta Laxman), mb.rao@ncl.res.in (M. Rao). Bioresource Technology 100 (2009) 6679–6681 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Bioresource Technology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/biortech