Improving ethanol production and viability of Saccharomyces cerevisiae by a vitamin feeding strategy during fed-batch process

Several bottlenecks in the alcoholic fermentation process must be overcome to reach a very high and competitive performance of bioethanol production by the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In this paper, a nutritional strategy is described that allowed S. cerevisiae to produce a final ethanol titre of 19% (v/v) ethanol in 45 h in a fed-batch culture at 30°C. This performance was achieved by implementing exponential feeding of vitamins throughout the fermentation process. In comparison to an initial addition of a vitamin cocktail, an increase in the amount of vitamins and an exponential vitamin feeding strategy improved the final ethanol titre from 126 g l–1 to 135 g l–1 and 147 g l–1, respectively. A maximum instantaneous productivity of 9.5 g l–1 h–1 was reached in the best fermentation. These performances resulted from improvements in growth, the specific ethanol production rate, and the concentration of viable cells in response to the nutritional strategy.