Water Hyacinth: A Potential Substrate for Bioplastic (PHA) Production Using Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Abstract

Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) regarded as the world’s worst weed has potential nutritional status that exploits its use as substrate for commercial production of value added products. This research work focuses on utilizing a cosmopolitan aquatic weed water hyacinth as a potential substrate for the production of PHA using Pseudomonas aeruginosa as the fermenting organism. Acid hydrolysis using HCl (1%) was used for breaking down complex sugars in the water hyacinth hydrolysate to easily fermentable reducing sugars. Sodium Hypochlorite digestion was employed for cell lyses and subsequent release of the intracellular PHA content from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Extraction of PHA from the fermentation media using chloroform extraction method produced a net yield of 65.51 % on 72 hours of incubation. Preliminary confirmation of the recovered product was done using Thin Layer Chromatography and Crotonic Acid Assay. Detailed study of the functional groups present in the recovered product was done using FTIR.