Shahriar Osfouri

This research aims to introduce a low-cost, non-commercial culture medium and optimize the operating conditions for biological chitin extraction from green tiger shrimp waste in the Persian Gulf zone. For this purpose, the two most commonly used microorganisms, Bacillus licheniformis and Lactobacillus plantarum, were obtained to deproteinize and demineralize the shrimp shells within both culture mediums using a successive two-stage process. It was found that the proposed non-commercial culture medium was more efficient than the purchased and ready-to-use commercial medium and increased deproteinization and demineralization efficiency by 9 % and 11 %, respectively. According to the optimization, which was performed using a response surface methodology based on a central composite design, the demineralization model is more complicated than the deproteinization model. The presented model predicted deproteinization and demineralization yields with good accuracy. The FTIR results revealed that shrimp shells and chitin have similar main functional groups, while the degree of acetylation of the extracted chitin was 62.26 %. SEM results illustrated the formation of microfibrils and the chitin structure's porosity. The XRD data showed that the crystallinity index of chitin was 93.9 %. Besides, the thermal stability of the extracted chitin, with a maximum degradation temperature of 380 ◦C is comparable with the literature data.