Biobutanol - Biotechnology in China: Biofuels and Bioenergy - page 87

better blending ability with gasoline, and direct use in conventional combustion
engines without modification [ 29 ].
Recently, a number of plants have been built or rebuilt in China to restart
ABE production with an expected production capacity of 1,000,000 tons of
solvents per year, and were summarized in Ni's review [ 38 ]. Meanwhile, bio-
butanol research was restarted using clostridial strains from public collection
centers or industrial strains. ABE research in China has been supported by
the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China
(863 Project, No.2006AA02Z237, 4.8 million RMB) and the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (NSFC, over 2.1 million RMB). In China's Twelfth
Five Year Plan (2011-2015), over 22 million RMB will be used to support biobutanol
research. Much progress on biobutanol R&D involved in genomics, proteomics,
metabolic engineering, and genetic manipulation tools has been published.
The main results of biobutanol research in China from published articles will be
reviewed in this chapter.
2 Advances in Butanol-Producing Microorganisms
2.1 Strains Used for Biobutanol Industry and Research
The strains for industrial ABE fermentation are all clostridial bacteria,
including Clostridium acetobutylicum, C. beijerinckii, C. saccharobutylicum, and
C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum [ 25 ]. The Clostridium strains used in Chinese
solvent plants were isolated and improved locally by individual plant and research
institutes, such as C. acetobutylicum No. 2 with excellent phage-resistant prop-
erties from the Shanghai Solvent Plant [ 18 ]. The main Chinese research groups
and their operating strains are summarized in Fig. 1 .
The Shanghai Cooperative Bio-butanol Group (SCBG) (Shanghai Institute
of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) mainly focus
on C. acetobutylicum EA2018 [ 53 , 54 ], which was developed by chemical
mutagenesis breeding of a soil-screened wild-type C. acetobutylicum. This strain
could produce a higher ratio of butanol in solvents (70%), and has been licensed to
several commercial producers in China. Li Yin's group (Institute of Microbiology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences) takes C. acetobutylicum DSM1731 [ 3 ] as the main
research material, and focuses on strain improvement by metabolic engineering to
enhance solvent production, improve butanol yield, and increase the microbial
tolerance against solvents. Another research group led by Prof. Li Fuli (Qingdao
Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
uses C. beijerinckii ATCC55025 as the research strain, which is an asporogenic
mutant of C. beijerinckii ATCC4259 and can use wheat bran for ABE fermenta-
tion [ 43 ]. There are also some other groups focused on biobutanol production from
various carbon resources.