A comparative study on biomass processing methods for oil production from Oscillatoria princeps

• Published in: Vegetos - International journal of plant research 2023-03, Vol.36 (1), p.238-248
• Main Authors: Patel, Smit, Adwani, Jitesh, Singh, Raushan, Majumdar, Debolina, Dahiya, Anjali, Verma, Kumar Sambhav, Pandey, Lalit Kumar, Rajput, Nitesh Singh, Kulshreshtha, Shweta
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biomedical and Life Sciences; Life Sciences; Plant Anatomy/Development; Plant Breeding/Biotechnology; Plant Physiology
• ISSN: 2229-4473; 2229-4473
• DOI: 10.1007/s42535-023-00588-3

The high photosynthetic capability of cyanobacteria and the presence of lipids in their membrane are attractive features to draw the attraction of its use in oil extraction which can be further used as a source of fuel. The present study was conducted to extract oil from Oscillatoria princeps. It was processed in different ways such as – control i.e., unprocessed sample, dried by lyophilization, dried by a hot air oven. In one sample, autoclaving was used as pre-processing step followed by the drying in hot air oven to find out the effect of drying method and pre-processing method on the oil extraction. Bligh and Dyer, Soxhlet extraction, and Folch method were used for the analysis of oil content using hexane and chloroform/methanol solvent. The results showed that pre-treatment by autoclaving followed by oven drying was the most effective method for oil production (96%). This is possibly due to the disruption of the cell membrane of Oscillatoria princeps during autoclaving which helps in higher yield. In the extracted oil, the free acid content was found to be in the range of 2.82 to 6.77. The FTIR analysis revealed the presence of unsaturated carbons (> C = C