Generation of surface-active substances from fungal systems

Abstract

Surface-active substances of biological origin (biosurfactants) have only been described in the past few decades. They have advantages of biodegradability and causes low toxicity to the environment. They have gained importance in research field and their applications are becoming wider. So far, limited reports are there over the generation of surface-active substances from fungal systems. Keeping this in view, we explored two oil tolerant fungal strains belonging to genus Aspergillus (RBD01 and RBD02) and determined the emulsification and surface activity of its cell free supernatant. The cell free supernatant of fungal stain RBD02 showed remarkable reduction in the surface tension of water. Crude biosurfactant of this strain was extracted by acetone precipitation method. The crude biosurfactant was further analyzed for lipolytic activity and was found to have ability of breaking down of triglycerides into free fatty acids (FFA). This indicated that extracellular lipase was also generated by the RBD02 with biosurfactant. The fungal stain RBD02 have ability of generating good quality of biosurfactant by utilizing oil as a carbon source and in addition extracellular lipase enzyme was also generated by RBD02 strain which had application in hydrolysis of oil. This observation is being noted first to be reported for any fungal strain, to the best of our knowledge.