The Effect Of PH On Bacterial Cellulose Production Using Bacteria and Yeast Isolates From Kombucha Culture In Molasses Media

Abstract

"Bacterial Cellulose (BC) is a valuable biomaterial with various purposes due to its unique properties. Bacterial cellulose is useful in fields such as biomedical materials, tissue engineering, drug delivery, food industry, paper, nanostructured biomaterials, and biocomposites. Despite being a very attractive material, production for BC is a relatively expensive process, due to the low productivity of culture strains and expensive culture media- which represents approximately 30% of the total cost. Agricultural and industrial byproducts such as Molasses as an alternative medium is worth considering for economic reasons. Molasses has rich nutritional content and vitamins which could be beneficial for microbial fermentation. Kombucha is a beverage produced by fermenting sweetened tea with kombucha culture. This fermentation process would result in 2 products: Kombucha beverage and Bacterial Cellulose. Kombucha consortium and its isolates are subject to static fermentation conditions using various pH acetate buffered media made with molasses and added caffeine. The analysis of yield in bacterial cellulose, the number of Colony Forming Units, caffeine consumption and the change of pH throughout this fermentation leads to a conclusion that a monoculture system with a single bacteria significantly improves the yield of BC compared to co-culture. Co-culture fermentation data suggests that lower pH, such as an adjusted pH of 4.0, has the largest BC yield and largest CFU compared to others, predictably due to low, uninhabitable pH for yeast, inhibiting them from competing for carbon. Generally, the broth pH increases over time, possibly due to the digestion of organic acids by microbes."