Focus on cellulose hydrolysis

Excerpt

The buzz around CELLULOSIC ETHANOL is creating a resurgent focus on cellulose degradation and hydrolysis. It has been a long time since the conversion of cellulose to glucose has received as much attention as it is about to receive in the near future. It has been my experience in the past that when asked about my research interests at a party, people tend to yawn and quickly move on to talk to someone else when I start to talk about cellulose and its degradation. This has changed in this issue of CELLULOSE, in which two diverging proposals for the modelling of cellulose hydrolysis are expounded. So it’s actually nice to be asked to reflect on it for once. Even better to see that it can inspire others to argue about the nitty-gritty details of mechanisms and models as we see in this issue the journal. Of, course, my friends and acquaintances don’t understand the real importance of cellulose as an industrial material in many different contexts and more crucially the importance of being able to model its degradation under conditions of thermal, oxidative and hydrolytic degradation. …