Biomass hydrolysis difficulties

It is evident that natural proteins are not a primary source of large amounts of amino acids, despite the fact that many of the acids are commercially significant chemicals and a few are commodity chemicals. The technical difficulties just alluded to include undesirable distributions of the amino acids in natural proteins, the sensitivity of proteins and amino acids to chemical hydrolysis conditions, racemization, the multiplicity of the product acids and the often low concentration of the desired acid or acids in the hydrolysate, and the consequent separation problems. Microbial synthesis of specific amino acids from biomass substrates or biomass-derived intermediates often has substantial advantages over thermochemical processing methods and is used for the commercial production of several of the amino acids. This is discussed in more detail in the next section. 

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