Obtención de nano-celulosa bacteriana utilizando hidrolizados de bagazo de caña y cáscara de cacao

Abstract

Cellulose is one of the most abundant biopolymers on Earth, and various applications in medicine and industry are being investigated. Most of it is found in plants (vegetable cellulose). However, the production of vegetable cellulose faces deforestation and costly purification processes problems. On the other hand, there are bacterial cellulose which has several advantages due to its characteristics; however, its production cost at industrial scale still exhibits problems. Therefore, use agro-industrial waste from cocoa and sugarcane as a carbon source to obtain bacterial cellulose presents a possible solution to the problem. Consequently, it was proposed to evaluate hydrolysis treatments on agro-industrial wastes to obtain fermentable sugars, which will be the carbon source in minimal mediums. Subsequently, cellulose yield produced by two acetic strains (PDC21 and PDC 25) and Komagataeibacter xylinus DSM 2004 (DSM 2004) was evaluated in the same medium. Once the appropriate treatment to produce cellulose was determined, which consisted of the use of cocoa shell hydrolyzate and the DSM 2004 bacteria, two cellulose hydrolysis methods were compared to obtain one of its derivatives, nano-cellulose, which was characterized morphologically by FT-IR and SEM. The research demonstrated the suitability of use hydrolysates of cocoa shell waste and sugarcane bagasse as low-cost carbon sources to produce bacterial cellulose. In addition, it was determined that the hydrolysis treatments used to obtain nano-cellulose do not influence its morphology.