Enzymatic characterization of Aspergillus brasiliensis in co-culture with Trichoderma reesei RUT-C30
co-cultures, fungal enzymes, biorefineries;
Lignocellulosic biorefineries are sustainable industrial facilities that use agricultural waste as raw material to produce higher value-added productssuch as biofuels and chemical “building-blocks”. One of the major costs of biorefineries is the enzymes needed to break down the plant cell wall into fermentable sugars. These enzymes are obtained from microbial sources such as filamentous fungi. The current industry standard for enzyme production are fungal monocultures. This technique produces limited cocktails, as no organism is capable of secreting all the necessary enzymes in sufficient quantities. An alternative to be explored is to simulate the degradation of organic matter that occurs in nature and to use more than one filamentous fungus in the enzymatic production, a practice called cocultivation. In this work, the enzymatic characterization of Aspergillus brasiliensis was performed and its co-cultivation with the fungus Trichoderma reesei RUT-C30 was evaluated using sugarcane bagasse as carbon source. The resulting enzymatic cocktails were characterized regarding the effect of strain inoculation time and the effects of pH and temperature on enzymatic activities. The results show that the profile of each enzymatic extract is highly dependent on the type of culture and the order in which the participating fungi were inoculated. Some of the co-cultures, under certain conditions, reached higher activities than their respective monocultures for enzymes such as CMCase, pectinase, β-glucosidase and β-xylosidase.