Paper Title
Evaluation of Polyesters Production in Submerged Cultivation of Cupriavidus Necator and Burkholderia Cepacia Strains Using Sunflower Seed as Substrate

Abstract
Microbiologically produced polyesters are known as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) which are an alternative to reduce the amount of non-degradable plastics discarded on the environment. The PHA can be produced from renewable raw materials such as glucose and sucrose, however, these sugars represent a high cost in the production chain and the use of cheaper substrates has been largely studied and broadcasted. In this paper, we proposed the evaluation of polyhydroxyalkanoates production using sunflower seed as an alternative substrate for the submerged cultivation of the strains Cupriavidus necator IPT 026 and 027, and Burkholderia cepacia IPT 119 and 400. All microorganisms tested were able to utilize sunflower seed to synthetize PHA, the highest polymer production was achieved using C. necator IPT 026 which exhibited 4.38 � 0.17 g l-1 of PHA with a concentration of 15 g l-1 of substrate in the fermentation medium. All PHA produced showed the bands of the characteristic functional groups of polyesters in the FTIR spectra. Index Terms- PHA, biopolymer, biosynthesis, sunflower seed, alternative substrate.