Abstract
Microbial oil is a necessary alternative to fossil or vegetable oil in the future. However, large-scale production is not yet economically viable. Diluted lignocellulosic waste streams are a cheap and therefore interesting source of carbon for microbial oil production. The use of reversible immobilisation of an oleaginous yeast in a continuous reactor with collection of the cells in which the oil has accumulated still has many shortcomings. High cell concentration, high oil accumulation and efficient remobilisation are extremely important. This requires a complex interaction between the carrier material, the microorganism and the medium composition. Several highly innovative solutions are being investigated in this project.
It will be evaluated whether the lignocellulose-derived inhibitors (furan aldehydes, organic acids and phenolics) in the substrate enhance the natural immobilisation of the yeast cells. To further increase the immobilisation efficiency, the application of co-immobilisation of yeast with mould as well as the use of zwitterionic polymers for simple reversible immobilisation will be investigated. Strain improvement, taking into account all the required characteristics of the microorganisms, will be carried out using adaptive laboratory evolution. These innovations should lead to an efficient system where the inhibitors from diluted lignocellulosic waste streams are valorised in the form of microbial oil.
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