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Biodegradation of alkali lignin by a newly isolated Rhodococcus pyridinivorans CCZU-B16

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Abstract

Based on the Prussian blue spectrophotometric method, one high-throughput screening strategy for screening lignin-degrading microorganisms was built on 24-well plate at room temperature. One high activity of alkali lignin-degrading strain Rhodococcus pyridinivorans CCZU-B16 was isolated from soil. After the optimization of biodegradation, 30.2% of alkali lignin (4 g/L) was degraded under the nitrogen-limited condition (30/1 of C/N ratio; g/g) at 30 °C for 72 h. It was found that syringyl (S) units and guaiacyl (G) in lignin decreased after biodegradation. Moreover, the accumulated lipid in cells had a fatty acid profile rich in C16 and C18 with four major constituent fatty acids including palmitic acid (C16:0; 22.4%), palmitoleic acid (C16:1; 21.1%), stearic acid (C18:0; 16.2%), and oleic acid (C18:1; 23.1%). In conclusion, Rhodococcus pyridinivorans CCZU-B16 showed high potential application in future.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20141172), the Key Laboratory of Fermentation Engineering (Ministry of Education), and the Green Catalysis and Applied Enzyme Group of Changzhou Vocational Institute of Engineering (No. 111308002216006).

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Correspondence to Yu-Cai He or Cui-Luan Ma.

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Chong, GG., Huang, XJ., Di, JH. et al. Biodegradation of alkali lignin by a newly isolated Rhodococcus pyridinivorans CCZU-B16. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 41, 501–510 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-017-1884-x

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