Kiran Babu Uppuluri
SASTRA University, India
Title: Cost effective production and applications of levan from Acetobacter xylinum NCIM 2526 using synthetic and complex medium
Biography
Biography: Kiran Babu Uppuluri
Abstract
Levan is a homopolymer of fructose naturally obtained from both plants and microorganisms. Microbial levans are more advantageous, economical and industrially feasible. Microbial levans have wide range of applications in food, medicine, pharmaceutical, cosmetic and commercial industrial sectors. With excellent polymeric medicinal properties and ease of production, microbial levan appear as a valuable and versatile biopolymer of the future. Inspite of its broad spectrum of applications, the industrial usage of levan is very limited due to the high cost of production processes. The present study demonstrates the economically feasible microbial production of levan by batch fermentation process both in sucrose rich medium and pretreated sugar cane molasses (SCM) using Acetobacter xylinum NCIM 2526. Further the present study also focused on the optimization of levan production in synthetic medium using one factor at a time approach followed by a statistical method, central composite design (CCD) with selected variables. Neural networks coupled genetic algorithm was applied to optimize the four key fermentation parameters in SCM; medium pH, inoculum concentration, amount of Ammonium bicarbonate and amount of initial levan for levan yield. The produced Levan was characterized using various physicochemical techniques such as FTIR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR spectroscopy, TGA and HPLC. The biomedical potential of the isolated A. xylinum levan for its anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory activities was exploited in vitro. The yield of levan was increased significantly from 0.54 to 13.25 g/L in sucrose containing medium and from 17.1 g/L to 122.24 g/L in SCMwith the optimized variables.