Large scale microbial cell disruption using hydrodynamic cavitation: Energy saving options

Abstract

Cell disruption is a crucial step in the recovery of intracellular products and has a huge impact on further downstream processing steps and associated cost. The non-selective recovery of intracellular product by conventional method is the major cause for the higher cost of bioproducts. Hydrodynamic cavitation is an emerging technology for the selective recovery of intracellular product at the cell disruption stage. In the present study, the hybrid strategy for the large-scale cell disruption has been developed using hydrodynamic cavitation with different pretreatment strategies such as exposure to the acidic stress, hypoosmotic acidic stress condition and reducing agent. The maximum enzyme recovery of 55.78U/ml and selectivity of 495U/mg were obtained at an optimized pretreatment of hypoosmotic acidic stress (3.6 pH, 0.05 M, 12 h) and reducing agent (2 mM Dithiothreitol, 2 h) followed by the cell disruption using hydrodynamic cavitation. The pretreatment prior to cell disruption by hydrodynamic cavitation increases the selectivity up to 4.79 times and energy efficiency up to 63.19 times as compared to high pressure homogenizer as a conventional method for the cell disruption.