Enhancement of Commercial Production of Polymeric PHB Material from Bacterial Strains through Mutagenic Strategies

Madhuri Girdhar¹, Ajay Sharma² and Anand Mohan¹

¹Department of Biotechnology, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India. ²Department of Chemistry, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/bbra/1557

ABSTRACT:

Poly-b-Hydroxybutyrate (PHB) is proving itself as an advance polymeric material as well as an alternative for plastic material. The only hinge stopping large scale utilization of PHB at industrial scale and in daily lives is its, economical production. Large scale economical production of PHB depends upon optimization and selection of high PHB producing strains. The present study investigates mutagenic strategies for the improvement of commercial strains for high scale PHB production in industries. Improvement of strains by mutation is very cost effective method and strategically better approach for getting maximum output of PHB. The mutation treatment was performed by Physical and Chemical methods i.e. Ultra violet radiation (Physical) and Acridine Orange treatment (Chemical). Mutation leads to an increase in the yield of PHB as in comparison to original strains which has proved through increase in PHB extraction from the mutated counterparts of Bacillus flexus and Bacillus megaterium. The results revealed that there was an excellent improvement in PHB production by almost 2 folds, when strain treatment was performed with physical mutagen (UV radiation) but no such improvement was seen with chemical mutagen (Acridine Orange). The PHB yield increased marginally from 15.68% to 18.61% with chemical mutagen where as in UV treatment the PHB yield increased exceptionally, from 15.68% to 23.70% in case of Bacillus flexus[Agriculture isolate M1] . In case of Bacillus megaterium UV exposed strain show a phenomenal increase in PHB yield from 11.76% to 25% but no such improvement again was seen in PHB yield through Acridine orange treated colonies i.e. 11.76% to 15.09%. The quality of produced PHB was assessed through FTIR. These results exemplify that physical mutagens can be more effective for improving commercial production of PHB from bacterial strains.

KEYWORDS: Poly-b-Hydroxybutyrate; mutagen; FTIR; economical.

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