Production of single cell oil from sugarcane hydrolysate: Evaluation of the olfactory profile of the products obtained (biodiesel and PUFA).

• Grant number: 24/20715-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Ana Karine Furtado de Carvalho
• Grantee: Matheus Roger de Andrade Albino
• Host Institution: Escola de Engenharia de Lorena (EEL). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Lorena , SP, Brazil

Abstract

2.121 / 5.000The growing global demand for energy and climate challenges are generating a search for new energy resources that can supply the market without causing environmental impacts and generating competition with the food industry. In this sense, biorefineries that use oils of microbial origin for the production of biofuels, based on the integration of the food, pharmaceutical and biofuel industries, emerge as promising alternatives. Thus, the objective of this work will be to use waste from the ethanol industry for the production of microbial lipids, as an attractive way to take advantage of biomass and agro-industrial by-products, in order to obtain new biofuels and bioproducts, without compromising food production. To this end, this project will use waste from sugarcane processing industries to cultivate filamentous fungi from Brazilian biodiversity in order to produce microbial lipids, which will later be used as raw material for the production of biodiesel from enzymatic transesterification and for the production of polyunsaturated fatty acids from enzymatic hydrolysis. The purified product will be developed according to classical ester identification methodologies and the olfactory profile will also be trained. As a form of innovation, this work will perform an olfactory analysis performed in an electronic nose and the results will be compared with specificity techniques and gas chromatography. This proposal is part of the search for analysis techniques that can compete with the industrial and economic point of view with classical techniques, which use considerable volumes of reagents, meaning an important benefit for the analysis of fatty acids and biofuels. In this context, the initiatives of this project are essential and may help to obtain data that contribute to the use of lipids obtained from microbial sources, allowing for the evaluation of the economic forecast of the global process in the near future.