Fermentation industrial chemicals

Fig. 24.22. Process flowsheet of butanol-acetone-ethanol fermentation. (Industrial Chemicals, Faith, Keyes and Clark, 4th ed., p. 178. Copyright John Wiley Sons, New York, 1975. Used by permission of the copyright owner.)...

The modem fermentation industries developed from the early era of antibiotics. Over 4000 antibiotics have been discovered since the 1950s. However, only about 100 are produced on a commercial scale and over 40 of these are prepared by a combination of microbial synthesis and chemical modifications. Antibiotics produced by fermentation and used as starting materials in chemical syntheses are given in Table 2. 

Fusel Oils. The original source of amyl alcohols was from fusel oil which is a by-product of the ethyl alcohol fermentation industry. Refined amyl alcohol from this source, after chemical treatment and distillation, contains about 85% 3-methyl-1-butanol and about 15% 2-methyl-1-butanol, both primary amyl alcohols. Only minor quantities of amyl alcohol are suppHed from this source today. A German patent discloses a distillative separation process for recovering 3-methyl-1-butanol from fusel oil (93). 

Synthesis of industrial chemicals by microbial cells may be by fermentation (free, living cells), immobilised growing cells, immobilised resting cells or immobilised dead cells. 

Table 9.6 Examples of hydroxylation of steroid nuclei by micro-organisms. (Data derived from Neidleman, SL "Industrial Chemicals Fermentation and Immobilised Cells" in "Biotechnology the Science and the Business", edited by Moses V and Cape RB, published by Harwood Academic, London 1991).

Unlike both the petrochemical and fermentation industries [1, 2], stoichiometric synthesis has for many years been a satisfactory tool for the preparation of molecules for application in life science industries. In recent years, however, the timely introduction of bio- and chemocatalysis has allowed organic synthesis in the fine chemical industry to meet both higher demands in molecular complexity of its products and a better process efficiency. 

Succinic acid. Succinic add is also available via fermentation of glucose, and has the potential to become a large-scale industrial chemical in the future. However, there are only a few reports on dehydration reactions involving succinic acids in the literature, and most of these are concerned with esterification to produce dialkyl esters. The synthesis of various dialkyl esters was reported using metal exchanged montmorillonite clays (Na, Mn ", ... 

Fermentations Yield a Variety of Common Foods and Industrial Chemicals... 

Controlled Oxidative Fermentations—by which a number of industrial chemicals are produced. Citromyces. for example, can be used fur the production of citric acid from sugar. Aspergillus niger will yield oxalic acid by partial oxidative fermentation, but if the mold is permitted to remain in contact with the acid, il will convert it to carbon dioxide. 

Wilke, D. 1999. Chemicals From Biotechnology Molecular Plant Genetics Will Challenge the Chemical and the Fermentation Industry. Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol., 52, 135-145. 

Consequently, all organisms including humans will be treated in the light of bioactive natural products. In other words, bioactive natural products related to biological industries including agriculture, forestry, fishery, food industry, cosmetics and personal care, and fermentation industries will be treated in this volume. The treatise, however, will be basic to include chemistry in all aspects of chemical ecology. Many of the applications are treated in Volume 3. 

Fermentation of the inexpensive industrial chemicals benzaldehyde and acetaldehyde with Sacchromyces cervisiae microorganisms leads to (R)-phenylacetylcarbinol, which is converted to the important drug substance (IR, 2S)-ephedrine. 

Fermentation is also used to treat industrial chemical or organic waste. The principle is very similar to the described anaerobic sludge treatment. That means that the organic material is converted to methane. Examples include waste containing cotton, rubber, plastics, fats, explosives, and detergents. The waste can be transferred to special treatment plants or be treated in situ in the open field where the waste was buried. Open-field microbiological treatment of spills or deposits of hazardous chemicals is a potentially attractive and inexpensive remediation method and has attracted a lot of research attention. So far, however, only a few examples have been successful. 

Chapter 9 presents an overview of modem fermentation processes and their application in food, pharmaceutical, and industrial chemical industries. The social and economic importance of fermentation processes is discussed. 

The chemical reactions involved in biological processes are often very sensitive to the hydrogen-ion concentration of the medium. In industries such as the fermentation industry the control of the pH of the materials being processed is very important. It is not surprising that the symbol pH was introduced by a Danish biochemist, S. P. L. Sprensen, while he was working on problems connected with the brewing of beer. 

In the early 1950s, the country had a moderately developed fermentation industry with an annual production of alcohol of about 10 million gal (compared with 88 million gal in 1977). Nearly 50% of this was used for fuel. The production of glycerine at this time from soap manufacturing was nearly 5000 tons. A little methanol was produced by wood distillation at Bhadravati, Mysore, while CaQ was nonexistent. During that period, important chemicals such as phenol, phthalic anhydride, urea, acetic acid, and organic and various solvents required by the dyestuff, pharmaceuti-... 

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