Dry separation of ground maize stems provides fractions with distinct enzymatic degradation patterns

The enzymatic saccharification of lignocelluloses depends on their physical state and chemical composition, which is related to tissue properties. The objective of the present work was to study the enzymatic degradation pattern of particles isolated through a dry separation process from maize plant. Whole plants without ears were ground and fractionated by turbo-separation. The fine- and medium-size particles were submitted to electrostatic sorting. The IMATORE reactor [1] allowed us to monitor the compositional changes and size evolution of the particles during saccharification. In all fractions, glucose and xylose were the major sugars. However, minor sugars displayed distinct distributions, fine particles being richer in arabinose and uronic acids. While the large particles were found to be lignin-richer, the fine ones exhibited the lowest lignin amount and a higher ratio of syringyl over guaiacyl units. The enzymatic degradation patterns differed between fractions. Not unexpectedly, large and fine particles were respectively the less and the more degraded, as revealed by their compositional and size changes. Interestingly, positive-deviated medium size particles had a particular behaviour with most of the sugar released during the first 30 min without any noticeable change in particle size. The negative-deviated medium size particles behaved like the large ones. The present work confirms that plant heterogeneity should be considered in the biorefinery chain. Next steps will be (i) to find the relationships of particles degradation pattern to stem histology and (ii) to improve the dry separation process in order to increase the saccharification yield.