Preliminary study on the production of bioprotein from skim latex serum and process growth optimization

Abstract

Currently, Malaysia is the third largest rubber producer in the world and this industry generates a large amount skim latex serum effluent waste. This abundantly wasteful effluent contains numerous quantities of hazardous materials and illegally discharges into the water stream. So, the production of bioprotein from skim latex serum, which is one of the unwanted wastes, is the alternative way to overcome the problem in the rubber industry all this while. Skim latex serum was used as a sole media to produce bioprotein which applicable as animal fodder. The screening part was aimed to identify which potential strains could produce the highest protein from the agar surface fermentation and submerged fermentation. As a result, the highest protein production was 0.946 mg/mL obtained with 25 % substrate concentration by Rhizopus oligosporus. So, this microbe was the most potential fungus among the tested microorganisms. The selection of Rhizopus oligosporus was not an issued since it was derived from tempeh and safe for food based application. Then, the interaction effect between the parameters such as inoculums size (1.5-4.5 %v/v) and substrate concentration (15-35 %v/v) has been statistically studied using Central Composite Surface (CCD) under Response Surface Methodology (RSM). In the optimization process, the design comprised of 11 runs with three center points. Thus, from analysis of variance (ANOVA) using quadratic polynomial equation, maximum protein content of 1.004 mg/mL was attained using 3 %v/v inoculums of Rhizopus oligosporus and 25 %v/v skim latex serum substrate concentration.