For practical applications of bioethanol, the uses of both highly concentrated biomass materials and their effective fermentation by yeasts are indispensable in order to produce ethanol at low costs. However, as the saccharified products of those biomass generally contain abundant sugars, the yeasts are affected by the compounds and are inclined to decrease their physiological activities. In the process of fermentation, ethanol is gradually produced by the yeasts in the culture;the concentrated metabolic product also damages itself, and inhibition of the fermentation frequently occurs. The application of yeasts with high fermentative activities under stress pressures such as sugars and ethanol is thus desired for bioethanol production. In this study, various types of high-fermentative yeasts under stress pressures were isolated mainly from coastal waters in Japan and characterized. All yeast strains with high fermentative activities under 20% v/v ethanol were found to be Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The HK21 strain isolated from Tokyo Bay and identified as S. cerevisiae had the highest fermentation activity under 30% w/v sorbitol and under 20% v/v ethanol, and it produced approx. 70 g/l (9% v/v) ethanol from the 15% w/v glucose solution at 25 oC within 5 days.
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