关键词: 木糖;转运蛋白;纤维素;燃料乙醇

Abstract:

Cellulosic ethanol produced by biological fermentation of agricultural and industrial residues, which has wide resources with low price, is regarded as the second generation fuel-ethanol. lignocellulosic fuel-ethanol is receiving more and more attention, owing to the fact that it does not compete for land with crops, neither for grain with human beings. Xylose is the major building blocks of hemicellulose, so its utilization is the bottleneck for realizing economical and feasible production of bio-ethanol from lignocellulose. Considerable effort has been made to introduce pentose-metabolizing pathways into Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and to optimize the native pentose phosphate pathway. But the rates of xylose consumption by such engineered strains and the ethanol yield are still lower than glucose. One of the most important reasons is the limitation of xylose from extracellular to intracellular. In other words, we have to discuss the importance of sugar transporters in xylose fermentation. In recent years, the importance of xylose transporters has been revealed, and big progress has been made. In this article, the current research on xylose transporters were reviewed and discussed.

Key words: xylose, transporter, lignocellulose, fuel-ethanol