Production and recovery of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) from biodiesel liquid waste (BLW)

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) has been paid great attention because of its useful thermoplastic properties and complete degradation in various natural environments. But, at industrial level, the successful commercialization of PHAs is limited by the high production cost due to the expensive carbon source and recovery processes. Pseudomonas mendocina PSU cultured for 72 h in mineral salts medium (MSM) containing 2% (v/v) biodiesel liquid waste (BLW) produced 79.7 wt% poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) at 72 h. In addition, this strain produced 43.6 wt% poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) (PHBV) with 8.6 HV mol% at 60 h when added with 0.3% sodium propionate. The synthesized intracellular PHA granules were recovered and purified by the recently reported biological method using mealworms. The weight average molecular weight (M_w ) and number average molecular weight (M_n ) of the biologically extracted PHA were higher than that from the chloroform extraction with comparable melting temperature (T_m ) and high purity. This study has successfully established a low-cost process to synthesize PHAs from BLW and subsequently confirmed the ability of mealworms to extract PHAs from various kinds of bacterial cells.