Preparation of Cellulose-Based Flocculant and Its Application in the Enrichment of Vitamin K(2) in Fermentation Supernatant

Nutritional food supplements and pharmaceutical products produced with vitamin K(2) as raw materials a very promising market in the global scope. The main production method of vitamin K(2) is microbial fermentation, but approximately 50% of vitamin K(2) synthesized by the main production strain Bacillus subtilis natto exists in extracellular form, which is not easy to separate and extract. In order to solve this problem, in this study, we synthesized a novel cellulose flocculant, MCC-g-LMA, by grafting reaction using microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) and lauryl methacrylate (LMA) as monomers, and ammonium persulfate as an initiator to flocculate VK(2) from the fermentation supernatant. The flocculant was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), elemental analysis, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and the grafting reaction was successful. When the flocculant dosage was 48.0 mg/L and pH was 5.0, the flocculation rate of the MCC-g-LMA on the fermentation supernatant reached 85.3%, and the enrichment rate of VK(2) reached 90.0%. Furthermore, we explored the flocculation mechanism of VK(2) by the MCC-g-LMA and speculated that the flocculation mechanism mainly included adsorption bridging, hydrophobic association and net trapping and sweep effect. In this study, the extraction method for trace high-value biological products in the fermentation supernatant was improved, which provided a method and theoretical basis for the efficient separation and purification of VK(2) and other terpenoids.