Universidade do Minho. Centro de Engenharia Biológica (CEB)
Abstract
Book of Abstracts of CEB Annual Meeting 2017Bio-based industries are focused on the use of renewable biological resources for the production of biobased products and biofuels. Under this scope, bioprocesses development based in low-cost substrates
has been the major goal of the team. The main objective is to give a competitive solution for the
biotechnological industry to re-use sub-products or wastes as feedstock, improving the sustainability of
biotechnological processes, through the use of greener and more
competitive technologies. Thus, is of
most importance to demonstrate that these technologies enable t
he production of new chemical
building blocks and new product
s from feedstocks that replace the need for fossil
based inputs.
In this context, the team has been focused on the study of the
potential of different low-cost and
renewable material to develop and
optimize fermentation process
es. Submerged fermentation
technology has been applied for several applications using the
yeast
Yarrowia lipolytica
such as: crude
glycerol from the biodiesel industry to produce organic acids (ex. citric acid), the renewable substrate
castor oil for aroma production and oily wastes for microbial lipids and lipase production. This yeast
species has been considered as cellular model for dimorphism st
udies. Its ability to change from oval
typical yeast shape to a pseudo hyphae morphotype has been studied by the team and correlated with
operational factors in bioreactors
[1]
. This morphological characteristic of
Y. lipolytica makes it one of
the few yeast species able to gr
ow under solid-state fermentation. With this knowledge, new
opportunities will be explored by the team under the scope of t
he recent financed project Waste4Lip,
such as the transformation of wastes into
feedstock for biorefineries by solid-state fermentation with
Y. lipolytica.
Solid-state fermentation (SSF) has many advantages in compariso
n to traditional submerged fermentation, such as: higher products titers, better yields, e
asier recovery of products, smaller reactor
volumes and low energy requirements. Over the last years, this
technology has been applied by the team
to up-grade solid wastes from olive oil and wine industries by
SSF with Aspergillus spp, producing added-
value compounds like enzymes and
phenolic compounds, and at the
same time, obtaining a fermented
solid with improved nutritional value to be used as animal feed. Strategies of wastes mixtures and pretreatments have been developed as
well as scale-up of the process to prove its feasibilityinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
