| Grant number: | 16/22086-2 |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral |
| Start date: | March 01, 2018 |
| End date: | January 31, 2021 |
| Field of knowledge: | Biological Sciences - Microbiology - Applied Microbiology |
| Principal Investigator: | Silvio Silvério da Silva |
| Grantee: | Avinash Prabhakarrao Ingle |
| Host Institution: | Escola de Engenharia de Lorena (EEL). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Lorena , SP, Brazil |
| Associated research grant: | 16/10636-8 - From the cell factory to the Biodiesel-Bioethanol integrated biorefinery: a systems approach applied to complex problems in micro and macroscales, AP.BIOEN.TEM |
Abstract The demand and need of energy including fossil fuels is dramatically increasing day-by-day since the last century. The use of such fossil fuels rising the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases and creating problems associated with global warming which is a major concern worldwide. Therefore, use of biofuels produced from lignocellulosic biomass reduce the heavy dependency on fossil fuels and also gain considerable attention due to their many inherent merits such as no or very less emission, renewability, sustainability, etc. Traditional pretreatment methods used for the conversion of glucose from cellulose present in lignocellulosic biomass have many limitations including low conversion rate. Hence, proposed research study is aims to develop nanotechnology based pretreatment methods for the hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass. The proposed study aims to synthesize silica-coated magnetic nanoparticles. The synthesized silica-coated magnetic nanoparticles will be acid-functionalized. Afterwards, they will be characterized with the help of UV-Vis spectrophotometry, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. These techniques will be essential to determine the size, shape and stability of synthesized nanoparticles. Subsequently, the synthesized nanoparticles will be screened for their efficacy in the hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass. Furthermore, all the different parameters required for the maximum conversion of cellulose to glucose will be studied and effective pre-treatment method for biomass will be developed. Various conventional physical and chemical methods are already available for the pretreatment of lignocelulose biomass. But they have certain limitations. The proposed study has the novelty in minimizing those limitations by using ecofriendly and efficient biological approaches mentioned herein. Moreover, immobilization of enzymes on magnetic nanomaterials offers additional advantages of reuse of enzymes. Acid functionalized nanoparticles offer many advantages and hence the proposed work will help in the development of efficient and ecofriendly pretreatment methods for the conversion of cellulose to glucose, which will be further used for sustainable biofuel production. (AU) | |
| News published in Agência FAPESP Newsletter about the scholarship: | |
| More itemsLess items | |
| TITULO | |
| Articles published in other media outlets ( ): | |
| More itemsLess items | |
| VEICULO: TITULO (DATA) | |
| VEICULO: TITULO (DATA) | |