Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
treatment methods are includes acids, alkalies and solvent treatments. However, Al-
kaline pretreatment is most common and successful method (Mandels et al.
1974
).
Biological process is better than other methods, because the microbial growth in-
crease protein content. Biological processes facilitate; Lower energy requirement,
higher yield of desired product, greater substrate and reaction specificity, lower pol-
lution and non-feasible transformation with chemical reagent. An ideal pretreatment
accomplished reduction in crystallinity of cellulosic fibers along with reduction in
the lignin content. On these biomasses, alkali alongwith steam treatment is proved
the effective methods for complete de-lignification which readily cleaves the ether
and carbon bonds leads de-polymerization and solubilization of the lignin polymer.
In our studies, pretreatment of aquatic biomass suggested that enzyme cellulase
activity increased after the pretreatment of biomass.
Saccharification is another process of hydrolysis of complex carbohydrate (e.g.,
starch, cellulose, lignin etc.) into its simpler forms or components. In composting
this is achieve by microorganisms involved with their enzymatic reaction. However,
chemical pretreatment and enzymatic saccharification both are in major consider-
ation (Saha et al.
2005
). Wide varieties of cellulosic material are readily saccharified
by the cellulases produced by
Trichoderma viride
(Mandels
1975
; Ghose
1969
),
Coriolus versicolor
(Zafar et al.
1889
),
Tremetis versicolor
(Valmaseda et al.
1991
),
Aspergillus niger
(Maheshwari et al.
1994
) and other higher cellulolytic fungi. Zhu
and Pan (
2010
) and Agbor et al. (
2011
) used pretreated biomass for cellulose pro-
duction. The exo-glucanase activity was observed maximum in alkali with steam
treated
E. crassipes
following by
I. aquatica
. The high enzyme activity in alkali
pretreat substrate promotes swelling of cellulosic fiber and reduction in crystal-
linity index. The fibres beyond water swollen dimensions allow increased enzyme
penetration into the fine structure of cell wall (Tarkow and Feistm
1969
). Similar
trend was observed in case of endoglucanases and β-glucosidase enzyme actions.
The catalase enzyme particularly both the susbstrate
E. crassipes
and
I. aquatica
preferred different pretreatment process for releasing maximum sugar formation
during saccharification (Kaur
1993
; Kour et al.
1993
).
4.4
Efficiency of Aquatic Biomass Residue as Compost
The utilization of plant residues is relatively new technology as a source of car-
bon compounds among existed resources exhausted in world. ABRs seems to be a
good sources of organic carbon and thus used as a compost to meet out the great
demand of organic manure. The water hyacinth is valuable in the compost due to
their high content of nitrogen. It tops the list of most dreaded aquatic weeds and
now spread around the globe. It has successfully resisted all attempts of eradicating
even by chemical, biological, mechanical or hybrid means. It is therefore, several
successful studies were conducted on pile composting of cattle manure, swine ma-
nure, municipal bio-solids, animal mortalities and food residuals. However, limited
investigations have been made on high rate windrow/agitated pile composting of
