Sucrose and water are mixed in E-flasks in ratio liquid:solid 10:1. Temperature is kept constant at 60° C. in an oven equipped with a shake table. Succinic acid is added to the flasks to give concentrations of 1, 3, and 5% acid by weight. The data is shown in Tables 5 to 7. An increase in the catalyst loading increases the rate of hydrolysis significantly at low temperatures. Yields after ten (10) hours hydrolysis for glucose and fructose are summarized in Table 1. The yields are based on the amount of glucose or fructose formed divided by the amount of sucrose hydrolyzed. For glucose at higher acid concentrations some product degradation takes place. For fructose some degradation is evident at all acid concentrations.

The fermentation medium contained the following components: Difco yeast extract 5 g/L, tryptone 10 g/L, (NH4)2SO4 2 g/L, MgSO4—7H2O 0.2 g/L, NaCl 10 g/L, K2HPO4 7 g/L,KH2PO4 3 g/L, glucose 7.6 g/L, xylose 1.85 g/L, and kanamycin 30 mg/L. The medium with all of the components except the antibiotic was autoclaved at 121° C. for 20 minutes. Kanamycin then was added upon cooling. This fermentation medium was used for both the inoculum flasks and the one-liter fermenter. For the inoculum, 50 mL medium was placed in a 250-mL flask and inoculated with 0.2 mL of the AFP184 stock culture which was maintained in 30% glycerol and at ?70° C. The flask was incubated in a incubator shaker at 37° C. and 250 rpm overnight (about 16 hours). The entire flask contents then were used to inoculate the fermenter which was maintained at 37° C.

These results show that a wheat-based bio-refinery employing coupled fungal fermentation and subsequent flour hydrolysis and fungal autolysis can lead to a bacterial feedstock for the efficient production of succinic acid(cas:110-15-6).