Asian Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology

Poly(hydroxybutyric acid) (PHB) and other biodegradable polyesters are promising candidates for the development of environment-friendly and completely biodegradable plastics. One of the major drawbacks in the production of PHB is production costs, since it requires large amount of carbon source. This calls for cheaper substrates that can be used as an alternative carbon source such as agro-industrial residues. Hence in the present work PHB producing bacterial strain was used to study the effect of different cheaper carbon and nitrogen sources in the production of PHB from batch work to a scale up level. The large scale production of PHB produced was further characterized by, FT-IR, NMR, GC-MS and TEM analysis. In this study, cane molasses was used as an additional carbon source at 2% concentration along with glucose for large scale production of PHB. Ammonium nitrate was used as the nitrogen source and the C:N ratio was maintained at 1:15. The maximum production of PHB was obtained at 24 hours of growth which was found to be 0.5 g/L and had a dry cell weight of 3.7 g/ L. The PHB produced was further analysed by GC-MS Analysis and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). The obtained PHB from scale-up studies were further electros pinned using different blends of polymers.