Abstract
Lactic acid (LA) is a nifty molecule with an eclectic range of applications in innumerable industries and is produced through biological and chemical processes. Factually, LA is converted into lactide (LAC), which is the precursor for polylactic acid (PLA). PLA is considered one of the first-rate replacements for petroleum-based products and is believed to be environmentally sustainable. Nevertheless, it has always been challenging due to increased PLA productivity costs. Reduction in the LA and LAC production price directly echoes the production price of PLA. Therefore, low-cost LA and LAC production methods have to be found to produce PLA effectively. Hence, this study uses cheap agricultural sources derived microbial LA to make LAC through dimerization. Produced LAC was analyzed through FT-IR, NMR, TGA and XRD. FT-IR results revealed that the successful dimerization of LA to LAC, NMR analysis revealed that the aligning of methine and methyl groups in produced LAC, TGA analysis exposed that the microbial LAC has more thermal stability than the commercial LAC, XRD results showed that the produced LACs are crystalline with 32% and 42% crystallinity. To the best of our acquaintance, this manuscript is pioneering one to describe LA production through microbial fermentation and uses this monomer to produce LAC through dimerization.
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Abbreviations
- LA:
-
Lactic acid
- LAC:
-
Lactide
- LAB:
-
Lactic acid bacteria
- MLA:
-
Microbial lactic acid
- CLA:
-
Commercial lactic acid
- CLAC:
-
Lactide from commercial source
- MLAC:
-
Lactide from microbial fermentation
- PLA:
-
Polylactic acid
- DP:
-
Direct polycondensation
- ROP:
-
Ring-opening polymerisation
- NMR:
-
Nuclear magnetic resonance
- XRD:
-
X-ray diffraction
- FT-IR:
-
Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy
- TGA:
-
Therma-gravimetric analysis
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Acknowledgements
All the author’s thanks to DST-PURSE, Department of Botany (Phase II—3rd Instalment), and RUSA 2.0, Alagappa University for the financial support of this research work, and also Research Instrumentation facilities of the Department of Botany, Energy Science, Animal Health and Management, Bioinformatics, Microbiology, Biotechnology, Inorganic Chemistry, Physics, Alagappa University, NMR facility, The Gandhigram Rural Institute—Deemed to be University. XRD Facility, Department of Physics, TGA and NMR Facility, Department of Chemistry, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan. The first author thanks to Taiwan Education Exchange Programme (TEEP) Internship for partially supporting this work. This work was also supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (MOST 111-2621-B-018-001 to Jui-Yu Chou). The first author thanks Dr. Immauel Paulraj, Dr. Pravinraj Selvaraj, Mr. Palepu Teja Ravindar, Ms. Catherine, and Ms. Agalya for their support and help.
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BVK: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; methodology; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing BM: formal analysis; methodology; MK: formal analysis; methodology; JKJPK: formal analysis; methodology; MJB and JYC: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; supervision; validation; visualization; writing—review and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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Balasubramanian, V.K., Balakrishnan, M., Murugan, K. et al. Synthesis and characterization of lactide from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens brewed lactic acid utilizing cheap agricultural sources. 3 Biotech 14, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-023-03855-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-023-03855-x