Dr. John Lucey is the director of the Center for Dairy Research (CDR). He shared the impressive bioprocessing research, equipment and expertise that is available across the UW-Madison campus during a national webinar hosted last month by BioMade.
CDR/UW-Madison are members of BioMADE. Some of the work that BioMADE supports overlaps with areas of research taking place at CDR. Specifically, CDR and other researchers are developing methods to utilize dairy co-products and agricultural residues to make value added materials (i.e., valorization), like green chemicals, biofuels, and natural food ingredients. The webinar helped garner interest in this work and connect with others in the BioMade network.
CDR and other research groups at UW-Madison are focused on utilizing dairy co-products. Currently these products have very low value. They can be used to produce higher-value products like organic acids, precursors for bio-based plastics, and biobased platform chemicals. These low value dairy co-products include acid whey and other dairy products. Currently, dairy plants are spending money to have these co-products processed by their wastewater treatment plants or dairy plants are using these co-products for low value applications like animal feed. There are also environmental concerns with these co-products as some plants have permission from the state to land spread them on agricultural fields.
Best Uses For Dairy Co-Products
Dr. Lucey and other researchers say that there is a better use for these dairy co-products.
“We have to change what we’re doing and change the way we look at these materials not as a waste product, but as organic materials to use for feedstocks to make value added chemicals or ingredients,” Lucey said. “These feedstocks contain a simple sugar and are very consistent. We have lactic acid bacteria that can readily ferment lactose into various high-end products such as natural chemicals and food ingredients.”
CDR is currently engaged with (supporting) other researchers across campus to develop and scale up technologies to ferment dairy co-products into these higher value chemicals. This work is being supported by a new grant program at CDR: Accelerate Biotechnological Innovations in Dairy (ABID). Dr. Lucey and ABID staff are currently seeking partners to help support and carry out this exciting work of developing technologies to valorize dairy co-products.
A key part of this work is ABID’s new 400L bioreactor. The equipment will help bridge the gap between benchtop scale technologies to industrial scale technologies necessary to make this work a reality in the dairy industry. In addition, Dr. Sonali Mohapatra recently joined the ABID program. She will play a vital role in the ABID grant program as the lead in conducting bench-, pilot-, and industrial-scale fermentation trials utilizing the new 400L bioreactor to optimize growth of the microbes (e.g., bacteria or yeast), metabolite production, and process reproducibility.
Several projects are already underway. One project is using dairy co-products to make polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable plastic. Another project has a technology that develops tagatose, a low-calorie sweetener, from various dairy co-products. ABID is also working with another group to produce butanol (biofuels) from dairy co-products.
