New Insights Taking Lessons from Past Mechanistic Analysis of Enzymatic Cellulose Degradation for Biomass Refinery

Abstract

Cellulase is an enzyme family for the production of sugars from cellulosic biomass, and the key enzyme of future biomass utilization. The history of the enzyme family goes back to the 19th century, whereas its mechanistic analysis was initiated in the latter half of the 20th century. Biochemical and structural studies have been carried out independently at that time, and static information was ex-panded to dynamic analysis in this century. In the present review, I would like to introduce an over-view of cellulase research in addition to our recent approaches to demonstrate single molecular obser-vations.