Orange residue and green coconut shell employed on enzyme production

Abstract

With an economy based on agricultural production, the Brazilian Northeast has large volumes of waste, that, when not properly disposed, cause environmental and health problems due to the attraction of insects and rodents and the stink coming from the degradation process. As an alternative to mitigate these problems and add value to waste, with the formation of commercial interest products, biotechnological processes appear. The application of solid state fermentation (FSS) is one of these alternatives, especially for being a simple and inexpensive process. It was evaluated in this paper the use of agro-industrial wastes as substrate for hydrolytic enzymes production by solid state fermentation from the fungus Aspergillus niger, conducted in 250 mL Erlenmeyer flasks supplemented with mineral medium in a way to have a final moisture content around 60%. The growth kinetics were monitored by measuring enzymatic activity, acidity, pH, reducing sugars (RS) and total reducing sugars (TRS). The results showed good efficiency in the production of polygalacturonase using the waste green coconut, lime orange peel and mixing of the two wastes as substrate, the highest polygalacturonase activity was 52.48 U/g, 22 52 U/g and 38.68 U/g, respectively, with weak activity in both pectinase. Lower values were also obtained for avicelase and carboxymethylcellulase activities for all wastes, indicating the need of an alkali pre-treatment to promote greater enzyme induction.Insert the abstract here.