GUILD ASSOCIATES INC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.8

Description

Bioethanol plants face several challenges to meet their operating costs and remain profitable. As the industry matures and becomes more cost competitive, risk-management, improving efficiency, and reducing operation costs have become higher priorities of plant operators. The majority of bioethanol produced in the U.S. is corn-based. Ground corn is treated with alpha-amlyase and gluocamylase to reduce starches to sugars digestible by S. cerevisiae yeast. While some of the enzyme will degrade naturally during the process or denature with exposure to ethanol, the remainder of the functional enzymes are lost in the distillers grains sold as a process by-product. Guild BioSciences proposes to use its ImmobiZyme™ platform technology to develop a product that will allow alpha-amylase and glucoamylase to be recovered and used in subsequent fermentations, reducing the overall enzyme-related costs associated with the prodcution of bioethanol. The capabilities of the ImmobiZyme™ products to meet the requirements of the bioethanol production process: physical and enzyme activity stability in the fermentation environment, ease of recovery, combatiblity with clean-in-place processes, and extent of reusibility will be validated through lab testing of individual operational conditons and through small scale fermentations. Opportunities for process optimization and scale up will be identified.