چکیده (انگلیسی):

Lactic acid, which can be obtained through fermentation, is an interesting compoundbecause it can be utilized in different fields, such as in the food, pharmaceutical andchemical industries as a bio-based molecule for bio-refinery. In addition, lactic acid hasrecently gained more interest due to the possibility of manufacturing poly(lactic acid), agreen polymer that can replace petroleum-derived plastics and be applied in medicine forthe regeneration of tissues and in sutures, repairs and implants. One of the great advan-tages of fermentation is the possibility of using agribusiness wastes to obtain optically purelactic acid. The conventional batch process of fermentation has some disadvantages suchas inhibition by the substrate or the final product. To avoid these problems, this study wasfocused on improving the production of lactic acid through different feeding strategies usingwhey, a residue of agribusiness. The downstream process is a significant bottleneck becausecost-effective methods of producing high-purity lactic acid are lacking. Thus, the investiga-tion of different methods for the purification of lactic acid was one of the aims of this work.The pH-stat strategy showed the maximum production of lactic acid of 143.7 g/L. Followingpurification of the lactic acid sample, recovery of reducing sugars and protein and colorremoval were 0.28%, 100% and 100%, respectively.© 2016 Sociedade Brasileira de Microbiologia. Published by Elsevier Editora Ltda. This isan open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).