Synthesis of advanced biomass model compounds

As the need for fuels and feedstocks from renewable resources is at an all time high, and utilising biomass and its associated valorisation is becoming an increasingly interesting and important topic. Widely used within the biomass valorisation community are models which are described as being ‘representative’ of the functionalities found in nature. These are often limited to glucose as a model for cellulose and simple phenolic aromatic compounds as models for lignin. Until now, there have been no reports in the literature of biomass model compounds which contain structural functionalities of both lignin and cellulose or hemicellulose. Described herein is the first ever general syntheses of such a class of compound. The major advantage of this class of compound is that they are totally soluble in water - a feature which previously was not available for most lignin models - And this gives greater access to catalytic systems which are operated in aqueous systems.