Low Cost Production of Yeast from Heat-stabilized Defatted Rice Bran

This Phase I project focuses on the economic production of yeast in an automated bio-reactor using rice bran as an energy and nutrient source. Rice bran is an under-utilized, abundantly available, low-cost co-product of the rice milling process and is currently used almost exclusively as an inexpensive additive in animal feed. The use of heat-stabilized defatted rice bran (HDRB) for the production of yeast is an innovative approach to increase the value of HDRB. In preliminary studies, yeast has been shown to have an equivalent growth performance in HDRB as in potato dextrose broth, a high performance growth medium, which indicates that HDRB provides the energy and nutrients necessary for optimal yeast production. Conditions will be optimized using response surface methodology to maximize the production of yeast from HDRB. Yeast is used in the production of and as an additive in a wide variety of foods and beverages. The yeast production industry and the industries that use yeast in their production process will benefit immediately from the availability of a new, low-cost, high performance growth medium for yeast. Riceland Foods, the worlds largest rice miller, saw great potential in the implementation of this process to increase the value of HDRB and has committed substantial cash start-up funds to Nutraceutical Innovations. The low-cost production of yeast is just one element of a patent-pending total system approach to produce a wide range of potential high market value products from HDRB.