Sustainable Production of Biosurfactants

One of the ways to reduce the costs of producing biosurfactants is to add value to the biomass and extract of the producing microorganism. For example the in vitro production of surfactins has a low yield and involves growing Bacillus subtilis in synthetic media using expensive substrates. During growth surfactin and other lipopeptides and enzymes important to the pharmaceutical industry food industry and ethanol production such as alpha-amylase lipase and cellulase are produced and secreted into the culture medium. At the end of microbial growth the extract is separated from the biomass by centrifugation. This biomass which would otherwise be discarded is a source of proteins and lipids with potential applications for the synthesis of other surfactants and can also be used for environmental decontamination. The main objective of this work is to present alternatives to reduce the costs of surfactin production.