Polyhydroxyalkanoates from A Mixed Microbial Culture

Rodrigues, Ana Marta; Franca, Rita Dias Guardão; Dionísio, Madalena; Sevrin, Chantal; Grandfils, Christian; Reis, Maria A. M.; Lourenço, Nídia Dana

http://hdl.handle.net/10362/143926

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Autores

Rodrigues, Ana Marta

Franca, Rita Dias Guardão

Resumo(s)

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are biopolymers with potential to replace conventional oil-based plastics. However, PHA high production costs limit their scope of commercial applications. Downstream processing is currently the major cost factor for PHA production but one of the least investigated aspects of the PHA production chain. In this study, the extraction of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) produced at pilot scale by a mixed microbial culture was performed using sodium hydroxide (NaOH) or sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) as digestion agents of non-PHA cellular mass. Optimal conditions for digestion with NaOH (0.3 M, 4.8 h) and NaClO (9.0%, 3.4 h) resulted in polymers with a PHA purity and recovery of ca. 100%, in the case of the former and ca. 99% and 90%, respectively, in the case of the latter. These methods presented higher PHA recoveries than extraction by soxhlet with chloroform, the benchmark protocol for PHA extraction. The polymers extracted by the three methods presented similar PHA purities, molecular weights and polydispersity indices. Using the optimized conditions for NaOH and NaClO digestions, this study analyzed the effect of the initial intracellular PHA content (40–70%), biomass concentration (20–100 g/L) and biomass pre-treatment (fresh vs. dried vs. lyophilized) on the performance of PHA extraction by these two methods.

Descrição

Funding: This work was funded by the INGREEN project that has received funding from the Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (JU) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 838120. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Bio-based Industries Consortium. This work was financed by national funds from FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecno-logia, I.P., in the scope of the project and the project LA/P/0140/2020 of the Associate Laboratory Institute for Health and Bioeconomy—i4HB. A.M. Rodrigues acknowledges the financial support of FCT through the PhD grant 2020.08574.BD. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.