Vegetable Oil-Biorefinery.

Conventional vegetable oil mills are complex plants, processing oil, fruits, or seeds to vegetable fats and oils of high quality and predefined properties. Nearly all by-products are used. However, most of the high valuable plant substances occurring in oil fruits or seeds besides the oil are used only in low price applications (proteins as animal feeding material) or not at all (e.g., phenolics). This chapter describes the state-of-the-art of extraction and use of oilseed/oil fruit proteins and phyto-nutrients in order to move from a conventional vegetable oil processing plant to a proper vegetable oil-biorefinery producing a wide range of different high value bio-based products.

Transcript and metabolite profiling for the evaluation of tobacco tree and poplar as feedstock for the bio-based industry.

The global demand for food, feed, energy and water poses extraordinary challenges for future generations. It is evident that robust platforms for the exploration of renewable resources are necessary to overcome these challenges. Within the multinational framework MultiBioPro we are developing biorefinery pipelines to maximize the use of plant biomass. More specifically, we use poplar and tobacco tree (Nicotiana glauca) as target crop species for improving saccharification, isoprenoid, long chain hydrocarbon contents, fiber quality, and suberin and lignin contents. The methods used to obtain these outputs include GC-MS, LC-MS and RNA sequencing platforms. The metabolite pipelines are well established tools to generate these types of data, but also have the limitations in that only well characterized metabolites can be used. The deep sequencing will allow us to include all transcripts present during the developmental stages of the tobacco tree leaf, but has to be mapped back to the sequence of Nicotiana tabacum. With these set-ups, we aim at a basic understanding for underlying processes and at establishing an industrial framework to exploit the outcomes. In a more long term perspective, we believe that data generated here will provide means for a sustainable biorefinery process using poplar and tobacco tree as raw material. To date the basal level of metabolites in the samples have been analyzed and the protocols utilized are provided in this article.