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.com
Volume 7, Issue 3(Suppl)
J Biotechnol Biomater, an open access journal
ISSN: 2155-952X
Euro Biotechnology 2017
September 25-27, 2017
17
th
EURO BIOTECHNOLOGY CONGRESS
September 25-27, 2017 Berlin, Germany
From glycolate to methane – A new biofuel production concept
Anja Taubert, Christian Wilhelm
and
Torsten Jakob
Leipzig University, Germany
T
he decreasing reserves of fossil-based energy sources and the climate change enforce the usage of renewable energy and biofuels.
Current microalgae-based approaches face the problem that the biological process of biomass production and the subsequent
harvest and refinement of biomass strongly decrease the energetic and economic balance. A new algae-based concept aims to avoid
biomass production; instead, an intermediate of algal metabolism (glycolate) is used for the methane production by anaerobic
fermentation. In this way, metabolic costs and energetic costs for biomass harvest and refinement could be drastically reduced/
avoided. Previous studies showed the ability of the green alga
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
to produce and actively excrete glycolate
under photo-respiratory conditions. It was proven that a microbial consortium can be adapted to use glycolate as main carbon source
for biogas production. The aim of the present study is to evaluate optimum conditions for glycolate production in a photo-bioreactor
under simulated natural conditions and to analyse the quantumefficiency of glycolate production in comparison to biomass formation.
It is further aimed to couple the photo-bioreactor and the anaerobic fermenter in a pilot installation to prove the technical feasibility
of this approach. From the obtained results, it can be concluded that a continuous production of glycolate is possible over a period of
at least several days. The achieved glycolate concentration in the culture suspension is high enough to feed microbial fermentation. It
was shown that the daily glycolate production (59 mgL
-1
d
-1
) is equivalent to that of algal biomass (62 mgL
-1
d
-1
).
Biography
Anja Taubert completed her Master of Science Degree in Biology with the focus on Biotechnology in 2015 at the Leipzig University. Within her Bachelor’s and
Master’s thesis she attended, environmental biotechnological questions in miniaturized wetlands, called planted fixed bed reactors, at the Helmholtz Centre for
Environmental Research (UFZ Leipzig) and contributed to two publications. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Plant Physiology at the Leipzig
University with the task to establish a self-contained system of autotrophic carbon allocation and heterotrophic production of biogas.
anja_ta@yahoo.deAnja Taubert et al., J Biotechnol Biomater 2017, 7:3(Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2155-952X-C1-077