ASPERGILLUS NIGER (A BIOCHEMICAL SPECIE)

I am final year student of chemical engineering and the topic of which I m writing is actually related to bio technology. Who cares,knowledge is power and this is due to my final year project. Which is the Production of citric acid from molasses using aspergillus niger as fungi.So, Aspergillus niger is a kind of bacteria which is actually a living organism who lives in colonies and appearing in the form of molds on most fruits and grain.It plays a key role in fermentation process. A substance that provides nourishment for growth is called nutrients. Note that Nutrients (C,H,O,N) plays an important role in growing of niger,if we dont supply a sufficient amount of nutrients it will effect the niger results in the starting of dead phase.Generally,there are 4 phases involved in cell growth. Lag phase : nothing occur 2-4 hr because cells try to adjust themselves. Exponential phase : Nucleus division (mitosis ) occurs and daughter cells formed from the cell division and due to high rate of bio-synthesis DNA synthesis occur till the DNA content of the cell has doubled .This is actually a cycle which repeats in sequence until exponential phase ends. Stationary phase : In Stationary phase new cells formed is equal to old dead cells. This is due to the deficieny of nutrients. Now the point has reached at which the cell starts fighting for nutrients and those who loses forming a dead phase.

Before taking advantage from aspergillus Niger in the fermentation process,we need to take a starter..which is actually an experiments on small scale.All we need to do is to select the substrate which should be high in sugar contents because it is the food of Niger. After giving them a suitable environment , temperature and pH . They starts growing , at the initial phase they try to adjust in the environment and this will take approx 24 hr.after that ..they enters in the exponential phase from where they increase exponentially followed by stationary and dead phase due to nutrients deficiency.The conversion of substrate to a desired value product will result in the formation of mycelium layer form on the surface of substrate. This is the growing part of Niger .In the lab ,the Operator Takes 3-5 samples every 24 hour , centrifuge it and check the amount of dead cell under microscope. Because dead cell are different in colour from living cell so it will help the operator in counting. After counting, the operator will find the ratio of no of dead cell to the no of total cells and from this he gets to know that how much nourishment is required by the cell to live in adjust environment.The starter is then introduced into Batch Reactor on Industrial scale. From Chemical engineering point of view, all growth process are modelled using monod equation including human growth. It is found experimentally that rate of growth decrease at high values of initial subsrate concentration. So, dilution of substrate is necessary because more product is formed as the specie growth increases but this is not only the case . ALL FERMENTATION PROCESS needs a biochemical species for the conversion of substrate into a useful product. And not only aspergillus niger , all micro-organism works in this way as I explained.