Production of xylooligosaccharides and monosaccharides from hydrogen peroxide-acetic acid-pretreated poplar by two-step enzymatic hydrolysis.

The severe pretreatment of poplar makes xylan difficult to utilize efficiently. In this work, poplar was pretreated by hydrogen peroxide-acetic acid (HPAC) with H2SO4 as catalyst to remove lignin, and the solid residues were used to produce xylooligosaccharides (XOS) and monosaccharides by two-step xylanase and cellulase hydrolysis. The results indicated that higher H2SO4 concentrations in the HPAC pretreatment of poplar afforded stronger lignin removal ability. An increased XOS yield of 19.8% was obtained from 200 mM H2SO4-catalyzed poplar by xylanase and the XOS purity was high, with a very low xylose/XOS ratio of 0.14. Higher glucose (75.2%) and xylose (61.4%) yields were obtained from the HPAC-pretreated poplar using 50 mM H2SO4 as catalyst. Finally, 16.9 g XOS and 296.4 g glucose were produced from 1 kg poplar by xylanase and cellulase. This study provides a method for producing functional XOS and monosaccharides from poplar using a simple reduced-pollution strategy.