Sciencemadness Discussion Board

A.niga

NEMO-Chemistry - 4-7-2016 at 13:54

Not sure if this is the right place but here goes.

According to wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid)

A.niga is used industrially to make citric acid, now i know its pretty cheap to buy but i am interested in trying this out.

Anyone know the best conditions/media for the fungus when making citric acid?

I would do a paper search but school holidays prevents me using the computer library there for a few weeks.

I tried google scholar but didnt find exactly what i was looking for. A heads up for a decent place to find papers on this from home would be appreciated.

Also tartaric acid can be made from lees from ethanol fermentation, i have alot of papers on fermentation and havnt seen this mentioned in any of them!

I will do a google scholar search but what i am after is hearing about others attempt to do either of these.

My motivation for looking into these is a kind of desert island chemistry using as much natural occurring things as i can.

I have a couple more in progress and my aim is too write it all up as a kind of different approach, i thought it might be a nice way to contribute something a little different to the normal synths that are done.

A kind of set of unusual ways to get common chemicals using as few off the shelf chems as i can.

I would like to post them all up as one at the end of the holidays.

Hopefully some will find it interesting.

A.niga is apparently everywhere in soil!! but i am going to try and see if i can get some to grow on an onion as a starting culture.

The lees one is really interesting as i make all my own Ethanol for extractions, but i cant find much about how to isolate or make it from fermentation waste.

I might get better paper access in a day or so if i take a trip to the city and use the uni library (if they take my school card!).

Inspiration was from the 5 OTC challenge by jsum1, i thought this would be a kind of nice take on it.

Doctor Cat - 4-7-2016 at 14:33

Funguses in general are relatively easy to grow.
This seems like a good and easy medium to make for a home set up. Growing Aspergillus is something I've been wanting to do for a while but I haven't found myself some time yet...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3716614

Though not very dangerous (level 1 biosafety), Aspergillus in general, but specially A. Niger should be handle with care... even though aspergillosis is uncommon in healthy people cases of infection have been reported and considering how much aspergillus loves your blood vessels it's better to avoid unnecesary risks.

[Edited on 10-08-2015 by Doctor Cat]

NEMO-Chemistry - 5-7-2016 at 02:51

Quote: Originally posted by Doctor Cat  
Funguses in general are relatively easy to grow.
This seems like a good and easy medium to make for a home set up. Growing Aspergillus is something I've been wanting to do for a while but I haven't found myself some time yet...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3716614

Though not very dangerous (level 1 biosafety), Aspergillus in general, but specially A. Niger should be handle with care... even though aspergillosis is uncommon in healthy people cases of infection have been reported and considering how much aspergillus loves your blood vessels it's better to avoid unnecesary risks.

[Edited on 10-08-2015 by Doctor Cat]


Thanks for that, i was having trouble finding much on culturing for this kind of thing. Now i need to go hunt the beastie down.

Couple of onions outside and wait see if i get black spots :D

Safety wise i will do what i can to keep exposure as low as i can, the reaction vessel will be sealed.

[Edited on 5-7-2016 by NEMO-Chemistry]

NEMO-Chemistry - 5-7-2016 at 04:09

Not sure why i couldnt access google scholar the other day?? but anyway it seems fine now and i have found several useful papers.

Incase anyone else feels like giving this a go i will post them here, i will post the experiments in a different thread once i have completed them all.



Attachment: THE_CITRIC_ACID_FERMENTATION_OF_ASPERGIL.pdf (1.7MB)
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Attachment: paper ikram on citric acid published pdf.pdf (100kB)
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[Edited on 5-7-2016 by NEMO-Chemistry]

Attachment: 3+Advances+in+citric+acid+fermentation+by+Aspergillus+niger-+Biochemical+aspects,+membrane+transport+and+modeling.pdf (598kB)
This file has been downloaded 762 times

Velzee - 8-8-2016 at 19:29

Quote: Originally posted by NEMO-Chemistry  
Not sure why i couldnt access google scholar the other day?? but anyway it seems fine now and i have found several useful papers.

Incase anyone else feels like giving this a go i will post them here, i will post the experiments in a different thread once i have completed them all.

[Edited on 5-7-2016 by NEMO-Chemistry]


I can't manage to find anything that is free, using Google Scholar. It's a shame. How did you do it?


Edit: fixed quote formatting



[Edited on 1-28-2017 by zts16]