Modeling and simulation of a structured model for analysis of hyaluronic acid fermentation by Streptococcus zooepidemicus under aerobic and anaerobic batch conditions

Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a linear high molecular weight glycosaminoglycan polymer made up of repeating units of β (14) N-Acetylglucosamine and β (13) D glucuronic acid. Producing large quantities of high molecular weight polymer with very low dispersity of molecular size is seen as a niche in a huge hyaluronic acid world market and microbial derived product could effectively fit into it. This study is to understand the model and simulate the aerobic and anaerobic batch fermentation using MATLAB R2007a and to make more sense of the existing data and improve the production which is one of the widely used methods to describe the process mathematically and construct an abstract model. By simulating it and varying appropriate parameters one can predict the nature of the fermentation and the total yield of the polymer. The studies were performed on Streptococcus zooepidemicus under aerobic and anaerobic batch conditions. In case of aerobic and anaerobic batch fermentation the rate constants of the reactions were varied by increasing it by 10 and 100 % and also decreasing it by 10 and 50 % and the initial carbon/nitrogen ratio were varied in various proportions.