Production of poly-β-hydroxybutyrate by Bacillus cereus PS 10 using biphasic-acid-pretreated rice straw

Poly-β-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years due to its potential use for production of fully degradable bioplastics, however, high cost of PHB production is the major bottleneck for its wide range industrial applications. In the current study rice straw hydrolysate (RSH) was employed as a cost-effective substrate for PHB production. RSH was prepared based on biphasic acid-pretreatment of rice straw i.e. first phase treatment with 1% sulphuric acid at 121 °C for 45 min, followed by second phase treatment using 5% sulphuric acid at 121 °C for 60 min (solid:liquid ratio, 1:10). RSH turned out be an efficient substrate for PHB production from a recently isolated Bacillus cereus PS 10, and yielded higher PHB amount than that obtained with glucose (8.6 g/L in glucose based medium vs 10.61 g/L in RSH based medium) after response surface methodology (RSM) based optimization. Design of experiments based on RSM was used to optimize three process variables i.e. amount of RSH and NH4Cl, and medium pH, and enhanced PHB yield (23.3%) was obtained. PHB produced was investigated by differential scanning calorimetry and X-ray diffraction powder analysis.