Scientists from the Department of Chemical Engineering of Lund University (Sweden), and the Department of Applied Biotechnology and Food Science, Budapest University Technology and Economics (Hungary) reported the use of "in-house" prepared enzymes from Trichoderma atroviridae on steam-exploded wheat straw and sugarcane bagasse. Wheat straw and sugarcane bagasse are agricultural residues that are potential feedstocks for cellulose-ethanol production. Steam explosion is a pretreatment method aimed at removing the lignin from the biomass and liberates the cellulose and other polymeric carbohydrates (such as hemicellulose) for subsequent breakdown into simple sugars (glucose from cellulose and xylose from hemicellulose). This breakdown is often termed, "saccharification". Steam explosion usually involves the thermal treatment of biomass with water under pressure. Then the pressure is suddenly released, causing the biomass to break and explode, with the simultaneous removal of lignin. For the saccharification step after steam explosion, the researchers used the enzymes produced by "in-house cultivation" of mutants from the fungi Trichoderma atroviridae. Their findings showed that "when a high glucose concentration was desirable in the hydrolysis of pretreated lignocellulosic materials, enzymes derived from the mutant Trichoderma atroviride TUB F-1663 were competitive with commercial enzymes". However, the supernatants of the mutant had lower xylose yield levels than a commercial enzyme mixture when used with pretreated substrates containing high levels of xylan and xylose oligomers. The study presently appears in a provisional pdf version in the open access journal, Biotechnology for Biofuels (URL above)..