Pretreatments
In order to break up the structure of duckweed cell wall to
improve microbial access, mild chemical or thermal pretreatments
were performed, and the effects on biohydrogen
production by fermentation were investigated. Table 1 shows
the pretreatment conditions that were selected. Because
duckweed is lacking a recalcitrant cell wall structure, the
temperature applied in the acid and alkaline pretreatments
was much lower than those reported in typical pretreatment
of lignocellulosic biomass [18,22,23]. Thermal pretreatment
was carried out at 120 C to evaluate the merit of possibly
avoiding chemical addition by applying a higher temperature.
All the pretreatments were carried out in 250 mL glass bottles.
One g of dry duckweed was mixed with 5 mL of either