Generally, the economic viability of microbial biomass production processes is limited by the cost of the fermentation medium, which can account for almost 30% of the total production cost. The use of alternative, low-cost and widely available raw materials becomes thus of special interest when producing products obtained from industrial microbial processes (Karatay et al., 2010).
Sugarcanemolasses(SCM)is a complex mixture of sugars(containing sucrose, glucose and fructose about 50% w/w) arising from sugar processing and it is obtained as a waste product of the sugar industry. Because of its availability and low cost (10% of pure sugar cost) it is considered a promising carbon substrate. Indeed it has been used as substrate to produce lipids (Johnson et al., 1995) and carotenoids (Bhosale and Gadre, 2001) by yeasts.