Succinic acid is an organic acid with two carboxylic groups. It is produced today mainly petrochemically from butane through maleic anhydride. Succinic acid(cas:110-15-6) is currently a low volume chemical. By production of succinic acid using biomass instead of petrochemicals as raw material, many new applications are possible. The production does not contribute to the accumulation of greenhouse gases since the feedstocks are renewable. A report from the U.S. Department of Energy designates succinic acid as a top twelve building block chemical produced from biomass (Werpy T., et al., Top Value Added Chemicals from Biomass. U.S. Department of Energy: Oak Ridge (2004)). Succinic acid(cas:110-15-6) can be used as a commodity or specialty chemical according to the report. As a commodity chemical it can substitute chemicals based on benzene and other intermediate petrochemicals to for instance produce polyester, solvents and other acids. Food ingredients, fuel additives and environmentally benign deicers are examples of specialty chemicals from succinic acid. The feedstocks of interest for producing succinic acid contain starch, hemicellulose or cellulose and can come from agricultural residues like corn fibres, forest products or beat and cane sugar.

In the second feedstock production strategy, flour hydrolysis conducted by mixing fungal broth filtrate with flour generated a -rich stream, while the fungal bio-mass was subjected to for the production of a nutrient-rich stream. The possibility of replacing a commercial semi-defined medium by these two streams was investigated sequentially. using only the -derived feedstock resulted in a concentration of almost 16 g l(-1) with an overall yield of 0.19 g per g flour. These results show that a -based bio-refinery employing coupled fungal and subsequent flour hydrolysis and fungal can lead to a bacterial feedstock for the efficient production of .

The biosynthesis of succinic acid(cas:110-15-6) from wheat flour was investigated in a two-stage bio-process. In the first stage, wheat flour was converted into a generic microbial feedstock either by fungal fermentation alone or by combining fungal fermentation for enzyme and fungal bio-mass production with subsequent flour hydrolysis and fungal autolysis. In the second stage, the generic feedstock was converted into succinic acid(cas:110-15-6) by bacterial fermentation by Actinobacillus succinogenes. Direct fermentation of the generic feedstock produced by fungal fermentation alone resulted in a lower succinic acid(cas:110-15-6) production, probably due to the low glucose and nitrogen concentrations in the fungal broth filtrate.