isoeugenol

In the recent years, the use of microbial biotransformation processes to achieve specific properties of vanillin and access to the natural vanillin origin has been a lot of attention. In the present study, Taguchi method was employed for optimizing the biotransformation of isoeugenol to vanillin under resting cells of native isolate Psychrobacter sp. strain CSW4. Five factors, i.e. initial isoeugenol concentration, initial dry biomass, co-substrates (glycerol, yeast extract and tryptone), initial NaCl concentration and metal ions (Cu, Zn and Co, were selected and experiments based on an orthogonal array layout of L18 were performed. Vanillin produced in the biotransformation reaction mixture was analyzed by HPLC method. Optimization of the process by Taguchi method showed that highest impact factors with importance priority of NaCl concentration, initial isoeugenol concentration, glycerol as substrate, cobalt ion and initial dry biomass were determined as optimum conditions for the biotransformation isoeugenol into vanillin, respectively. Under these optimized conditions, the highest vanillin concentration (1.016 g/L) obtained after 24-h reaction biotransformation. The molar yield of vanillin produced from isoeugenol was 43.8%. Results of this study indicate that if optimization of medium composition is performed to balance the cell growth and vanillin amount, reasonable yields of vanillin have been achieved, without addition ofany toxic organic solvent or other chemicals which increase the cost of production.