Lipid biotechnology: Industrially relevant production processes

Abstract

The biotechnological transformation of vegetable oils and animal fats has been successfully developed up to an industrial scale in recent years. However, biotechnology is still a niche technology in the oleochemical industry, which classically relies on chemical transformation processes. Nevertheless, the impact of biotechnology is rising, with an increasing number of biotech-based products, especially in the area of lipidderived specialties, entering the market. In this review we give a summary of the industrially relevant processes in the field of lipid biotechnology.

Transformation of Biomass into Commodity Chemicals Using Enzymes or Cells

“…Therefore, lipases are more likely to be useful for regioselective hydrolysis of triglycerides to obtain specialty fatty acids with heat labile groups, such as polyunsaturated fatty acids. 348 Besides, lipases can be used for producing related products such as fatty acid methyl esters (section 10.1).…”

Oleochemical Industry Future through Biotechnology

“…The upgrading of plant oils through the production of fatty acid alkyl esters FAAE is thus a subject of great interest in many industries 47 . Wax esters can be defined as industrial esters that are produced in low volumes but are highly priced with high profit margins 48 .…”

Thanks to literature and fellow scientists

“…And this is exactly what happened. In a subsequent review article (Schörken and Kempers, 2009) the figure 3 consider to be biased was copied without comment. This figure makes a comparison between the chemical interesterification and the enzymatic interesterification and I have reproduced it below as figure 3; I omitted the textual comments because I consider these to be misleading.…”