The fuel ethanol industry is now making use of a very efficient process where virtually all sugar substrates are converted to ethanol. Nevertheless, some metabolic by-products excreted from Saccharomyces cerevisiae tend to reduce the ethanol yield. Of such, glycerol is the major one, accounting for about 5-10% relative to the amount of ethanol produced. / Glycerol plays an important role in maintaining the redox balance within the cells by oxidizing the cytosolic NADH under anaerobic conditions. It is also believed that it acts as an osmoprotectant and would be favourably produced in high osmotic pressure conditions. / In order to mitigate the production of glycerol, various aeration strategies were investigated in a single-stage continuous fermentation system. Oxygen dissolved in the fermentation medium put the yeast in aerobiosis, acted as an oxidizing agent and hence minimised the specific glycerol production by 36% as compared to a completely anaerobic fermentation. / This has hardly been reproduced in a more industrially relevant system using a multi-stage continuous fermentation process. Indeed, oscillations in the concentrations of the various metabolites over time made difficult the assessment of significant changes. Nevertheless, these findings open the door to further investigations in order to understand the effect of oxygen in continuous fermentations using very high gravity feeds, such as in the fuel ethanol industry.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.100789 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Cyr, Normand. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Bioresource Engineering.) |
| Rights | © Normand Cyr, 2006 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002599967, proquestno: AAIMR32685, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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