Abstract: Butyric acid is an organic acid widely used in food, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Its production process bases chemical synthesis, but with the public awareness of environmental protection and the oil reduction, biological synthesis receives more and more concern of the community. This paper focuses on renewable resources like cassava starch, sugar cane molasses and xylose waste residue for the microbial fermentation to produce butyric acid.
Because of butyric acid fermentation inhibited by its end products, microbial fermentation is both low productive and expensive nowadays and difficult to compete with chemical synthesis. The metabolic pathway of butyric acid is discussed here. Present advance in selective breeding of butyric-acid-producing bacteria by the means of metabolic engineering and applications of immobilized fibrous-bed bioreactor and extractive fermentation are introduced. After the problems in butyric acid production by microbial fermentation are analyzed, some ideas about its further development are presented.
The paper used Clostridium Clostridium tyrobutyricum ATCC 25755 for the production of butyric acid and made glucose reference. It focused on the influence of the pretreatment of cassava starch, sugar cane molasses and xylose waste residue on the cell growth and the fermentation.
