EFFECT OF NUTRITIONAL AND PROCESS PARAMETERS ON PRODUCTION OF COPOLYMER, POLY (HYDROXYBUTYRATE-CO-HYDROXYVALERATE) BY HALOMONAS CAMPISALIS MCM B-1027 AS ASSESSED USING TAGUCHI DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are a group of microbial biodegradable polymers
having potential to replace synthetic plastics. Several factors are known to influence
PHA biosynthesis e.g., bacterial strain used, carbon and nitrogen sources provided,
culture conditions, etc. These factors interact with each other during productionand
their interaction can be assessed using statistical methods. In the present study,
Taguchi Design of Experiments is performed to find out the effect of six different
factors viz. incubation period, medium: flask volume ratio, pH of production medium,
concentration of maltose, yeast extract and sodium chloride at three levels on
production of PHA with 18 well defined experiments (L18 Orthogonal Array). The data
obtained was analyzed statistically and it was found that incubation period was the
most significant factor contributing 28.84% to PHA production while concentration of
maltose was found to be the least significant (1.81%) in the PHA production.