Bacterial Cellulose production by K. saccharivorans BC1 strain using crude distillery effluent as cheap and cost effective nutrient medium.

Bacterial Cellulose (BC), a valuable biopolymer gaining importance over the past few decades due to its remarkable properties and applications. In this study, crude distillery effluent having a high COD value of 87,433 mg/L was used to produce Bacterial Cellulose under static fermentation by Komagataeibacter saccharivorans, a novel isolated bacterial strain. 1.24 g/L of cellulose production was noted after eight days along with 23.6% reduction in COD value. The BC pellicle was purified, lyophilized and stored. Further, the lyophilized BC pellicle was subjected to characterization techniques such as SEM, ATR-FTIR, XRD, NMR and TLC. Morphological analysis revealed that cellulose fibers were dense with higher porosity and an average fiber width of 60 nm. FTIR depicted similar functional groups as that of BC-HS medium. TLC of the biopolymer was performed to evaluate its purity. X-ray diffraction and 13C NMR studies gave more insights about the crystalline and the amorphous regions; the synthesized polymer exhibited 80.2% as crystallinity and crystallite size of 8.36. Hence, the present study demonstrates that distillery effluent waters could be effectively reused as production medium fulfilling two objectives namely one reducing COD and making the effluent safe for disposal and two to produce a value-added product.