FUNGI PRODUCING XYLANASE USING PALM OIL MILL EFFLUENT.
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of study
Palm oil processing was carried out using large quantities of water in mills where oil is extracted from the palm fruits. During the extraction of crude palm oil from the fresh fruits, about 50% of the water results in palm oil mill effluent (POME). It is estimated that for 1 tonne of crude palm oil produced, 5 – 7.5 tonnes of water ends up as POME (Ahmad et al., 2003). The solid waste products that result from the milling operation are empty fruit bunches, palm fibre, and palm kernel. In both traditional and modern milling settings, these solid waste products are all put to economically useful purposes such as fuel material and mulch in agriculture. It is the POME that is usually discharged into the environment enzymes are distinct biological polymers that catalyze the
chemical reactions and convert substrates to particular products (Haq et al., 2006). Xylanase have gained a unique place in the biotechnological sector due to their potential application in palm oil mill effluent industry (Kirk and Jefferies, 1996), food and feed industry (Bhat, 2000), textile industry (Csiszár et al., 2001) and Biofuel production (Goldschmidt, 2008). Xylanases constitute one of the most important industrial enzymes that depolymerizes xylan molecule into xylose units (Garg et al., 2011). The production of enzymes generally depends on variety of growth parameters like inoculum size, pH value, temperature, inducers, medium additives,
aeration, growth and time (Immanuel et al., 2006) and also the enzyme activities depend on the presence of various metal ions as activators and inhibitors (Muhammad et al., 2012). Enzymes have various applications different industries.
The major industrial applications of enzymes are in textile industry for‘bioEndo-1, 4-β-D-xylanases
(E.C.3.2.1.8) are hemicellulases accountable for random cleavage of the xylan backbone, thus, are industrially significant. (Zhou et al., 2008). Among the microbial sources, filamentous fungi are particularly interesting since they secrete these enzymes into the medium and have high xylanase activity in contrast to yeasts and bacteria
