Résumé
The existence of pilot and industrial scale biorefineries worldwide demonstrates the technical andeconomic feasibility of fractionating lignocellulose (LC) for chemistry and energy. This raisesnew questions about the biomass supply, management of its quality and about the elementary stepcombination in processes, to choose which compound will be main- or co-products from plantbiomass.Integrated and systemic approaches are requested to invent and/or to improve the biotechnicalfractionation of LCs and there is a need to collect and correlate the existing knowledge in astructured way, to gain a better insight of the overall process. Building such a knowledgerepresentation is important for scientists, research institutes, universities and industries, as it willgive a shared description of the knowledge in that field, that will further facilitate its diffusion,re-use, review, reassessment and updating with new findings.Practically, an extensive literature has been published in the past five years on the biorefinery ofLC, focusing mostly on the saccharification of polysaccharides (cellulose, hemicellulose). As aconsequence, most of the data available results from biochemical and physicochemical analyzesfrom several processing chains, which combine different modes of physical pretreatments and/orchemical typologies of variables biomass and/or various hydrolytic enzyme cocktails.That is why a project for development of a hypertext electronic Knowledge Book onLignoCellulose DeConstruction (KB-LCDC) was initiated by the French National Institute forAgricultural Research (INRA) with two main goals: i/ to elicit the available knowledge fromvarious sources, more specifically related to the enzymatic hydrolysis of wheat straw intoglucose, ii/ to represent the knowledge and implement it into a web-based format of KnowledgeBook (KB) taking into account the overall saccharification process.The knowledge was first elicited by means of semi-structured interviews with a group of sixexperts working in several INRA research Units, and involved in the Institute’s biomass transformation network. Concomitantly, the collating of data and knowledge from “grey-” andpeer reviewed- literature was also done.Then, our approach consists in building a knowledge book (KB) whose pages are formattedconcept maps (Cmap) and technical sheets that are connected by hypertext links. A Cmap is asemantic graph where nodes represent concepts that are connected by arcs expressingrelationships between them. A formatted Cmap answers a specific question about one centralconcept (for instance: what is the impact of the pretreatment on the reactivity of biomass ? Howdoes enzyme diffuse into the lignocellulose ?). Hyperlinks existing between Cmaps and technicalsheets form a network of knowledge, into which the user can navigate, to find relevant answers,but also associated concepts. Hyperlinks can also link Cmaps or technical sheet to an Internetpage, scientific article and any document selected to illustrate the reality of a concept.Up to nine knowledge areas have been identified so far, among them: biomass pretreatment;separation methods; enzyme cocktails; substrate reactivity, hydrolysis mechanisms. A globalrepresentation of the overall process from wheat straw to glucose, based on the individual Cmaps,has been built. It includes a static structural view (environment and reactivity of the media,encompassing the cell wall); a dynamic view (hierarchy of the different sub-processes at work)and a functional view (description of the elementary steps and how they are organized in time).In the frame of the LBT III congress, the practical structuration of the knowledge and the originalversion of the KB will be disclosed. The potential development and use of this new approach forthe representation of biotechnology processes applied to LC will be discussed (process workflow;unlocking cell wall recalcitrance; strategic roadmaps).