Selvakumar K, Srinivasan G, Baskar V and Madhan R
Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are completely biodegradable and biocompatible plastics having interesting characteristics for a significant number of industrial applications. The production amount of these polymers at the industrial scale is however minimal and their cost of production is higher. This is mainly because of the high economic need of traditional solvent extraction based downstream strategies of PHAs isolation. In this research work, we have studied the production and isolation of polyhydroxyalkanoates from halophilic archaebacterial strain, Haloarcula marismortui MTCC 1596. The strain has produced high amounts of PHAs in the presence of excess carbon and limited nitrogen source in the medium. The intracellular PHA compounds were isolated by osmotic cell lysis method using distilled water. This method was found to be simple and cost effective for cell lysis and it can be able to reduce the high downstream processing expenditure of conventional PHAs isolation procedure. Further, the optimisation of PHAs production media was carried out by altering the carbon sources. Among all, sodium acetate was found to be a potential source for the high production of PHAs. Through the results we obtained, it can be concluded that the production and isolation of polyhydroxyalkanoates from this halophilic archaeabacterial strain using osmotic cell lysis method is profitable.
