Bacterial Contamination and Its Effects on Ethanol Fermentation

Samples were collected from a commercial ethanol production plant to enumerate the bacterial contamination in each step of a starch based ethanol production process. Though the slurry of raw material used in the process carried bacteria with various colony morphology in the order of $10^4$ per ml, only the colonies of white and circular form survived and propagated through the processes to the order of $10^8$ per ml at the end of fermentation. Almost all of the bacterial isolates from the fermentation broth were lactic acid bacteria. Heterofermentative Lactobacillus fermentum and L. salivarius, and a facultatively heterofermentative L. casei were major bacteria of an ethanol fermentation. In a batch fermentation L. fermentum was more detrimental than L. casei to ethanol fermentation. In a cell-recycled fermentation, ethanol productivity of 5.72 g $I^{-1} h^{-1}$ was obtained when the culture was contaminated by L. fermentum, whilst that of the pure culture was 9.00 g $1^{-1} h^{-1}$. Similar effects were observed in a cell-recycled ethanol fermentation inoculated by fermentation broth collected from an industrial plant, which showed a bacterial contamination at the level of 10$^8$ cells per ml.