Eco-friendly cellulose nano fibers via first reported Egyptian Humicola fuscoatra Egyptia X4: Isolation and characterization

Abstract

The conversion of microcrystalline cellulose chemically to nanofiber is the very complicated reaction in progress. From these methods, microbial enzymatic hydrolysis was studied a lot, but it is containing some of drawbacks. The aim of this study is how to overcome these disadvantage of enzymes hydrolysis and enhance it by using the in suite fungal enzymes production. The fungal enzymes play an important role in the green environmental reactions. For that, the new potential fungal strain (first reported in Egypt) is isolated from agriculture wastes to produce nanostructure cellulose, Followed by identification the morphological and molecular biology tools. The morphological identification was done by studying the growth of fungal isolate Humicola Fuscoatra Egyptia X4 on Czapek-Dox's and examining of mycelium and spores, while the molecular biology identification was done by extraction of the total genomic DNA and compared with the global recorded database onto national centre for biotechnology information (NCBI) using BLAST program. The produced cellulose nano fibers (CNFs) were characterized by FTIR, SEM, TEM, DLS, zeta potential, TGA, XRD and Surface area. These techniques showed that the extracted CNFs have dimension of 93 ± 5.6 nm in length and 12 ± 4.7 nm in width, higher value in the crystallinity, high mean hydrogen bond strength, high surface area, and high stability.