Currently, nearly all commercial LA production
is based on carbohydrate fermentations using pure cultures of lactic
acid bacteria (LAB) (Datta and Henry, 2006). Previously we have
demonstrated the feasibility of LA production from commercial
potato peel waste by mixed culture fermentations operated in
batch and sequencing batch modes (Liang et al., 2015c, 2014).
Analyses of samples from these fermentations showed that the
reactor microbes were dominated by the genus Lactobacillus at
the end of fermentation (Liang et al., 2015a). In this study different
agricultural peel wastes were prepared and employed to further
investigate the effects of different substrates on the performance
of LA production, as well as temporal variation in reactor microbial
communities during mixed culture fermentations.