GREEN BIOMASS SUSTAINABLE SOURCE OF PROTEIN

The increasing demand on biobased chemicals, being produced in an ecological and sustainable way, is a well-established estimation and biorefineries represent one promising route to fulfil these requirements due to their multi- product and integrative concepts. One of the biorefinery type is green biorefineries with basic concept which utilize the whole green biomass (like grass, alfalfa, forest biomass and various other sources) to generate a variety of interesting products including proteins. Furthermore, in developing a green biorefinery platform, the choice of biomass is important in order to have in the end cost- effectiveness process with high potential of scale-up. Moreover, it is important to have biomass source through the whole year so conservation of biomass like silage is necessary to be include into designing a biorefinery process. Based on aforementioned, the aim of our study was to evaluate four plant species alfalfa, red clover, nettle and phacelia grown in Croatia as source of protein. The protein isolate from both fresh biomass and conservation biomass as silage were analysed for total protein content and the amino acids composition were determined by gas chromatography. Furthermore, the size of isolated proteins and the most prevalent fraction was determined using protein gel- electrophoresis.