ABSTRACT
Biosurfactants are biological surface-active agents produced naturally by some species of microbes. They have an amphiphilic character in nature because they have both hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions in their molecular structure. This allows them to cluster at interfaces of fluids that have different polarities, thereby reducing surface tension. This confers them a solubilizing property, which is important to many processes around us and in the industry. Biosurfactants are very promising, and they have drawn a lot of interest due to the fact that they are based on renewable resources, sustainable, and biologically degradable. Bio-based products have extended to market for many areas alongside current shifts in industrial processes from synthetic to more sustainable bio-based products. Besides, other properties as well as lower toxicity, higher foaming, high selectivity, and specific activity under extreme conditions such as temperature, pH, and salinity make it competitive with its current synthetic counterparts.
Nowadays, biological surfactants are economically one of the most sought biotechnological compounds. There are numerous works on low-cost substrates for their production, but the strategies related to bioprocess optimization, coproduction, and yield amplification using molecular, nano-technological approaches have been studied less. Therefore, ineffective bioprocessing has occurred, and it has diminished the larger-scale production of these compounds. This chapter focuses on the recent improvements for biosurfactant production, its application fields, its profitable importance such as market share and challenges to commercialization, and the approaches that can be proposed to produce biosurfactants more economically.
