Rate of glucose production from milled rice straw using Trichoderma reesei cellulase: Experiments and numerical models

Abstract

We experimentally determine the effect of the concentration of cellulase enzyme from Trichoderma reesei to the rate of glucose production for different rice straw preparations. We then map the system using two approaches: (1) a kinetic model following the Michaelis-Menten equation (MME) and (2) a computational paradigm based on a three layer feedforward neural networks (NN). We show that a framework based on MME can accurately quantify the glucose rate production at low enzyme concentrations. In particular, the experimental deviation is just 2.2 ± 0.5% and 1.9 ± 0.8% when enzyme is at 0.0018 fpu/ml and 0.0033 fpu/ml, respectively. However, when the enzyme concentration is increased to 0.02 fpu/ml, MME breaks down and the model deviation becomes 21.1 ± 6.2%. The NN approach on the other hand deviates by no more than 2.5% for all enzyme concentration cases considered. The article is also the first available material that reports on the apparent Michaelis constant and maximum reaction rate of milled rice straw in the presence of Trichoderma reesei Cellulase.