Assessing a mixture of biosurfactant and enzyme pools in the anaerobic biological treatment of wastewater with a high-fat content

Abstract

The use of rhamnolipid-type biosurfactant produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa was evaluated for solubilization of fat present in effluent from a poultry processing plant, followed by anaerobic biological treatment. The rhamnolipid was used in combination with enzyme pools produced by solid medium fermentation of the fungi Penicillium simplicissimum and Penicillium brevicompactum. In experiments with raw effluent, the accumulation of fat caused the specific methane production (SMP) to be much less than with pretreated effluent (0.074 vs. 0.167 L CH4/g chemical oxygen demand (COD) removed). In experiments with pretreated effluent, the SMP ranged from 0.105 to 0.207 L CH4/g CODremoved. A statistical analysis of the results of four sequential batches found that all variables had a significant effect on the SMP in the fourth batch. A fifth batch was initiated for three conditions, and it led to the highest SMP when compared with the control, which showed similar behaviour for the SMP over time, ending up with values three times greater than the SMP in the control conditions. The residual oil and grease analysis revealed removals from 51% to 90% with pretreated effluent and only 1% in the control conditions with raw effluent. Thus, the best synergistic effect of fat release/hydrolysis of effluent components from a poultry processing plant was found with a 0.5% P. brevicompactum pool and rhamnolipid at half the critical micelle concentration (24 mg/L).

A convenient test for lipase activity in aqueous-based solutions

“…Generally, lipase can catalyze a wide range of reactions, such as hydrolysis, transesterification, alcoholysis, acidolysis and esterification [2][3][4][5]. More than 50 lipases have been identified and they have tremendous application potential in food industry, medicine, hygiene, chemistry, chemical engineering, environmental protection and energy development [6][7][8][9][10]. For lipases practical applications in industrial, their catalytic activity must be understood.…”

The Protagonism of Biocatalysis in Green Chemistry and Its Environmental Benefits

“…As a result, the microorganisms rapidly consume the substrate introduced into the reactors, with no accumulation of triacylglycerols and operational problems resulting from this accumulation. Our research group also evaluated the coupled use of enzymes and biosurfactants in the processing of wastewater [118,119]. This is a new approach, because the use of biosurfactant had only been reported to increase the hydrolytic activity of lipase [120], cellulases [121], and bacteria that exhibit lipase and biosurfactant activities [122].…”

Producción y evaluación de un biosurfactante para la biorremediación de suelos contaminados con hidrocarburos

“…Asimismo, tienen el potencial para ser empleados como tensoactivos ecoamigables (Lai et al, 2009;Bana et al, 2010;Mukherjee y Das, 2010;Sachdev and Cameotra, 2013) y han sido propuestos en aplicaciones petroquímicas como la recuperación mejorada de crudo y ambientales como la biorremediación de sitios contaminados, remoción de metales pesados, manejo de derrames de petróleo y aceites, dispersión de derrames (Dehghan-Noudeh et al, 2005) y remoción de otros contaminantes (Banat, 1995;Cavalcante et al, 2008;Banat et al, 2010;Vaz et al, 2011). Se han empleado biosurfactantes ramnolipídicos en combinación con tratamientos enzimáticos (enzimas de Penicillium simplicissimum y Penicillium brevicompactum), para la depuración de suelos contaminados con grasa permitiendo además mejorar la producción de metano, alcanzando una remoción de grasa de 51 a 90 % (Damasceno et al, 2014).…”