Essay On Butyric Acid

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Butyric acid is a fatty acid with short-chain (C3H7COOH). The esters of it exist in animal fat and some plant oil naturally [18]. Butyric acid can be used as an ingredient in varnishes, perfumes, pharmaceuticals, disinfectants and used for producing plastics, plasticizers, surfactants and textile auxiliaries [18]. It can be applied in animal feeds and used as flavoring agent in food products with the form of esters and salts [18]. It also can serve as substrate to produce butanol [1, 2]. Butyric acid can be produced by petrochemical or biological methods [18,76]. Although nowadays butyric acid is mostly produced from petroleum feedstocks, producing it from renewable feedstocks by microbial fermentation draws more attention due to the limited resources and application as food additives or cosmetic products [18,22].
In the microbial fermentation, a number of gram-positive, obligate anaerobic microorganisms have the ability to produce butyric acid in significant quantities like Clostridium sp. and Butyrivibrio fibrisolnes [18]. Among these, Clostridium tyrobutyricum, a gram-positive and obligate anaerobic bacterium, is most promising because of its capability of producing butyric acid with high selectivity, tolerance of high concentrations of products [22] and relatively high and stable productions [3, 4, 5, 6].
The metabolic pathway of Clostridium tyrobutyricum is shown in Figure. 1. The end-products are butyrate and butanol while acetate and acetone are byproducts. Lactate and ethanol are produced but just in small amounts [77]. Solvents include butanol, ethanol and acetone are produced when pH <5 during solventogenesis phase. Acids are produced during acidogenesis phase when pH is higher [77]. Acetyl-CoA is branch-point intermedia...

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...spectively after dilute-acid pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis [26]. Also some research chose 1g/l [27, 28] or 2 g/l [21, 29] as the maximum concentration of furfural. The concentrations of furfural in this research were divided into four levels to be studied: 0.6 g/l, 1.2 g/l, 1.8 g/l and 2.4 g/l.
As to syringaldehyde and vanillin, similar to furfural, concentrations of 0.06g/l and 0.04 g/l were found in the solution of corn strover after sulfuric acid hydrolysis respectively and the author also tested both of them at 2 g/l [24]. Cells of S.cerevisiae and Z. mobilis are mostly killed by 2g/l of vanillin or 1.5 g/l of syringaldehyde [23]. So although the concentrations in the hydrolysis solution were not high, this research still chose a maximum of 2.8 g/l of both of them to do the study. They had same concentration levels: 0.7 g/l, 1.4 g/l, 2.1 g/l and 2.8 g/l.

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