Production of Itaconic Acid from Jatropha curcas Seed Cake by Aspergillus terreus

Abstract

Submerged substrate fermentation of Jatropha seed cake, a by-product of oil extraction from Jatropha curcas seed was carried out using Aspergillus terreus for the production of itaconic acid. The Jatropha seed cake was initially converted into fermentable sugars by dilute acid hydrolysis using 50% sulphuric acid. The rate of hydrolysis was 1.04 gL -1 . The fermentation process was carried out at room temperature, agitation of 400 rpm and three physico-chemical parameters (pH, inoculum size and substrate concentration) were varied. Itaconic acid and glucose assays were carried out by spectrophotometry and Dinitrosalicylic acid methods respectively daily. Maximum yield of itaconic acid was 48.70 gL -1 at 5 ml of inoculum size, 50% substrate concentration and pH 1.5. The residual glucose concentration increased for the first two days of fermentation after which it began to decrease as the itaconic acid concentration increased. The least concentration of itaconic acid observed was 6.00 gL -1 , obtained after 24 hours of fermentation with 4 ml inoculum size, 50% substrate concentration and at pH 1.5. The findings of this work indicate that Jatropha curcas seed cake is a suitable substrate for itaconic acid production.

Submerged Fermentation of Jatropha curcas Seedcake in Production of Itaconic Acid by Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus terreus

“…The optimum pH that gave the highest IA yields were pH 2.5 producing 204 g L -1 and pH 3.5 producing 195 g L -1 by A. niger and A. terreus respectively ( Figure 3). This is similar to the findings of many workers who put the range of optimum pH for IA production between pH 3.0-4.0 (Rao et al, 2007;Meena et al, 2010;Sudarkodi et al, 2012;Chandragiri and Sastry, 2011;El Imam et al, 2013;Rafi et al, 2014;Omojasola and Adeniran, 2014). Some workers have proposed pH 3.1 as the optimum for IA production (Kuenz et al, 2012;Hevekerl et al, 2014;Gao et al, 2014).…”

“…These include corn starch (Yahiro et al, 1997); cane molasses (Meena et al 2010); sweet potato peel (Omojasola and Adeniran, 2014); rice bran, groundnut shell, orange pulp, groundnut oil cake and sugar cane bagasse (Rafi et al 2014); sago starch hydrolysate (Dwiarti et al 2007). JSC has also been used by some earlier workers (Rao et al 2007;El Imam et al 2013). Both workers employed Aspergillus terreus as fermenting organism recording peak IA yields of 24.46 g L -1 after 120 h and 48.70 g L -1 respectively.…”

“…In addition, they also produce a number of proteases which will assist in metabolizing the substrate (Castro and Sato, 2014;Sethi and Sahoo, 2016). Chandragiri and Sastry (2011) reported maximum yields at 35% glucose concentration using U. maydis; 40% using Jatropha seed cake by A. terreus (El Imam et al 2013) and 10% using sweet potato peel using A. niger and A. terreus respectively.…”

Fungal Fermentation of Lignocellulosic Biomass for Itaconic and Fumaric Acid Production

“…Filamentous fungi can be grown on renewable resources such as lignocellulosic biomass owing to their capacity to hydrolyze biopolymers to yield easily assimilable energy sources [13]. In the last few decades, some investigations have focused on the production of IA from renewable biomass, first from starchy materials such as corn starch, molasses, or grains, achieving the production of 0.36 g of IA/g of sago starch [14] or 48.70 g/l from Jatropha seed cake hydrolysates [15]. Rhizopus species were shown to be the best producers of FA.…”

Itaconic Acid Production by Filamentous Fungi in Starch-Rich Industrial Residues

“…Thus, there is a need to use cheaper substrate such as carbohydrate-rich waste to bring down the cost. Few studies have been carried out with jatropha seed cake [3], sorghum bran [4] and sago starch [5] in the past for IA production, but other starchrich wastes still remain to be explored.…”