The influence of pretreatment methods on saccharification of sugarcane bagasse by an enzyme extract from Chrysoporthe cubensis and commercial cocktails: A comparative study

•Chrysoporthe cubensis produces an enzyme mixture with high specific activities.•The alkali-pretreated bagasse resulted in the best sugars release by all mixtures.•The C. cubensis mixture was the best one for sugarcane bagasse saccharification.•C. cubensis has a great potential as enzyme producer for biomass hydrolysis. Biomass enzymatic hydrolysis depends on the pretreatment methods employed, the composition of initial feedstock and the enzyme cocktail used to release sugars for subsequent fermentation into ethanol. In this study, sugarcane bagasse was pretreated with 1% H2SO4 and 1% NaOH and the biomass saccharification was performed with 8% solids loading using 10 FPase units/g of bagasse of the enzymatic extract from Chrysoporthe cubensis and three commercial cocktails for a comparative study. Overall, the best glucose and xylose release was obtained from alkaline pretreated sugarcane bagasse. The C. cubensis extract promoted higher release of glucose (5.32g/L) and xylose (9.00g/L) than the commercial mixtures. Moreover, the C. cubensis extract presented high specific enzyme activities when compared to commercial cocktails mainly concerning to endoglucanase (331.84U/mg of protein), β-glucosidase (29.48U/mg of protein), β-xylosidase (2.95U/mg of protein), pectinase (127.46U/mg of protein) and laccase (2.49U/mg of protein).