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The key role that cellulose accessibility plays in restricting enzyme-mediated hydrolysis of cellulose

2025· review· en· W4417345958 on OpenAlexafffund
Jie Wu, Tianjie Ao, Yufeng Yuan, Zhangmin Wan, Richard P. Chandra, Jack Saddler

Bibliographic record

VenueBiotechnology Advances · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicBiofuel production and bioconversion
Canadian institutionsTrinity Western UniversityWestern UniversityUniversity of British Columbia
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsCelluloseCellulaseBiomass (ecology)LigninHydrolysisLignocellulosic biomassEnzymatic hydrolysisPolysaccharide

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Although cellulose can be found in nature in an unassociated form (e.g., cotton, microbially derived cellulose, etc.), it is typically associated with other polymers such as lignin and hemicellulose. However, even "pure" cellulose has proven difficult to hydrolyze, primarily due to the lack of enzyme accessibility to the glycan chains. Thus, typically, much higher protein/enzyme concentrations and longer incubation times are needed as compared to hydrolyzing starch, a related glucose polymer. The "crystalline" structure of most of the cellulose and its close association with other lignocellulosic components (e.g., lignin, etc.) restrict the enzyme accessibility of the cellulase enzyme "cocktail". Consequently, some form of pretreatment plus the addition of accessory enzymes are typically needed to enhance cellulose hydrolysis. Although biomass-derived sugars can be readily detected and quantified, assessing cellulose accessibility by methods such as pore-volume, Simon's stain, cellulose binding domain (CBM) adsorption, etc., has proven problematic. Effective pretreatment, which maximizes the recovery of biomass components and increases cellulose accessibility, is typically required to achieve high glucose yields from biomass feedstocks. In addition, an optimized "cellulase cocktail," which further improves accessibility and is more resistant to factors such as end-product inhibition, is usually necessary to reach efficient hydrolysis. The influence of these and other issues are discussed below.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.002
Threshold uncertainty score0.008

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.260
Teacher spread0.245 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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