Essay On Biosurfactants

1. Introduction
Biosurfactants or microbial surfactants are the diverse group of surface active substances synthesized from microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and yeast or excreted extracellularly ‘Kaur et al. (2012). Like conventional chemical based synthetic surfactants, biosurfactants have ability to reduce surface tension of solution, lower the interfacial tension between two liquids, allow easier spreading, and thereby enhance surface active properties ‘Nitschkea and costab (2007). Commonly, biosurfactants are neutral or anionic in nature. The hydrophilic moiety of biosurfactants can either be a phosphate group, a carbohydrate, an amino acid, or some other compounds ‘Sharrel et al. (2007).
Production and analysis of biosurfactants are active and extensively acknowledged areas for researchers, which are gradually gaining interest due to their wide range of advantages over chemically synthesized surfactants. Chemical surfactants are found to be highly toxic even at low concentrations and poses environmental risks by producing detrimental compounds through incomplete biodegradation ‘Gutiérrez et al. (2002). Even after the sewage treatment, a high percentage of the surfactant molecules remain unaffected which

Better biodegradability and lower toxicity of biosurfactants make them many times superior over conventional synthetic counterparts. The main limiting factors associated with biosurfactants are their high production cost and their purity concern that can be overcome through the selection of suitable renewable alternate of the substrate and designing of cost effective, multi-step downstream and feasible procedures. Moreover, the ability of recombinant and mutant hyper-producer microbial strains based a variety of cheaper substrates, will be able to produce better yield of