Solid state fermentation for microbial products : A review

Solid state fermentation (SSF) technology has been widely used in the industry over the last three decades. The advantages of SSF processes attract the researchers and industrialists to pay attention onto this system than the other fermentation systems even though there are some concerns in this system such as: problem in scale-up, higher requirement for controlling process, unavailability of direct analytical procedures to determine the biomass directly in the substrate and heterogeneous fermentation conditions. Wide ranges of microbes are used in the SSF system to produce diverse economically important products such as enzymes, organic acids, secondary metabolites, antibiotics, biofuels, biocontrol agents and vitamins at low cost and less labor. If the culture growing conditions are optimized and the issues related to scaling up for larger level and controlling the system under different environmental conditions are solved, then SSF could be efficiently used to produce extensive human needs through microbial products without causing any environmental pollution.