Enzymatic Bioconversion Trends for Lignocellulosic Biorefineries

Biorefinery platforms emerge as a promising and sustainable approach to replace technologies based on chemical synthesis. Several challenges for the future are in line with the development of biorefineries, such as seasonal availability, land use, logistics, and yields. Among all, from a technical point of view, enzymatic hydrolysis is one of the biggest critical points, with several bottlenecks to be overcome. However, it is a unique process capable of converting lignocellulose with the production of nonconventional bioproducts with greater purity, such as prebiotic oligosaccharides, fermentable sugars, and generating opportunities for the development of emerging products, such as bacterial nanocellulose. Thus, this chapter emphatically describes the biotransformation of lignocellulose from different sources, addressing enzymatic technology and processes, to produce emerging bioproducts, highlighting future challenges and opportunities for the research and industrial fields.