Toxicity Profiling of Biosurfactants Produced by Novel Marine Bacterial Strains

Surface active agents (SAAs), currently used in modern industry, are synthetic chemicals produced from non-renewable sources, with potential toxic impacts on humans and the environment. Thus, there is an increased interest for the identification and utilization of natural derived SAAs. As such, the marine environment is considered a promising source of biosurfactants with low toxicity, environmental compatibility, and biodegradation compared to their synthetic counterparts. MARISURF is a Horizon 2020 EU-funded project aiming to identify and functionally characterize SAAs, derived from a unique marine bacterial collection, towards commercial exploitation. Specifically, rhamnolipids produced by Marinobacter MCTG107b and Pseudomonas MCTG214(3b1) strains were previously identified and characterized while currently their toxicity profile was assessed by utilizing well-established methodologies. Our results showed a lack of cytotoxicity in in vitro models of human skin and liver as indicated by alamar blue and propidium iodide assays. Additionally, the use of the single gel electrophoresis assay, under oxidative stress conditions, revealed absence of any significant mutagenic/anti-mutagenic potential. Finally, both 2,2’-azino-bis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonicacid) (ABTS) and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl radical (DPPH) cell-free assays, revealed no significant anti-oxidant capacity for neither of the tested compounds. Consequently, the absence of significant cytotoxicity and/or mutagenicity justifies their commercial exploitation and potential development into industrial end-user applications as natural and environmentally friendly biosurfactants

Marine-Derived Surface Active Agents: Health-Promoting Properties and Blue Biotechnology-Based Applications

Surface active agents are characterized for their capacity to adsorb to fluid and solid-water interfaces. They can be classified as surfactants and emulsifiers based on their molecular weight (MW) and properties. Over the years, the chemical surfactant industry has been rapidly increasing to meet consumer demands. Consequently, such a boost has led to the search for more sustainable and biodegradable alternatives, as chemical surfactants are non-biodegradable, thus causing an adverse effect on the environment. To these ends, many microbial and/or marine-derived molecules have been shown to possess various biological properties that could allow manufacturers to make additional health-promoting claims for their products. Our aim, in this review article, is to provide up to date information of critical health-promoting properties of these molecules and their use in blue-based biotechnology (i.e., biotechnology using aquatic organisms) with a focus on food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical/biomedical applications

Surface-active biopolymers from marine bacteria for potential biotechnological applications

Surface-active agents are amphiphilic chemicals that are used in almost every sector of modern industry, the bulk of which are produced by organo-chemical synthesis. Those produced from biological sources (biosurfactants and bioemulsifiers), however, have gained increasing interest in recent years due to their wide structural and functional diversity, lower toxicities and high biodegradability, compared to their chemically-synthesised counterparts. This review aims to present a general overview on surface-active agents, including their classification, where new types of these biomolecules may lay awaiting discovery, and some of the main bottlenecks for their industrial-scale production. In particular, the marine environment is highlighted as a largely untapped source for discovering new types of surface-active agents. Marine bacteria, especially those living associated with micro-algae (eukaryotic phytoplankton), are a highly promising source of polymeric surface-active agents with potential biotechnological applications. The high uronic acids content of these macromolecules has been linked to conferring them with amphiphilic qualities, and their high structural diversity and polyanionic nature endows them with the potential to exhibit a wide range of functional diversity. Production yields (e.g. by fermentation) for most microbial surface-active agents have often been too low to meet the volume demands of industry, and this principally remains as the most important bottleneck for their further commercial development. However, new developments in recombinant and synthetic biology approaches can offer significant promise to alleviate this bottleneck. This review highlights a particular biotope in the marine environment that offers promise for discovering novel surface-active biomolecules, and gives a general overview on specific areas that researchers and the industry could focus work towards increasing the production yields of microbial surface-active agents

Phase Behaviour, Functionality, and Physicochemical Characteristics of Glycolipid Surfactants of Microbial Origin

Growing demand for biosurfactants as environmentally friendly counterparts of chemically derived surfactants enhances the extensive search for surface-active compounds of biological (microbial) origin. The understanding of the physicochemical properties of biosurfactants such as surface tension reduction, dispersion, emulsifying, foaming or micelle formation is essential for the successful application of biosurfactants in many branches of industry. Glycolipids, which belong to the class of low molecular weight surfactants are currently gaining a lot of interest for industrial applications. For this reason, we focus mainly on this class of biosurfactants with particular emphasis on rhamnolipids and sophorolipids, the most studied of the glycolipids