Two extraction methods have been carried out in this
work in order to study the possibility of the strain to produce other qualities of PHA besides PHB. Extraction
with acetone by Soxhlet was used in previous works to
extract medium-chain-length PHA (Jiang et al. 2006).
These are PHA biopolymers that contain 6 to 14 carbons
in their subunits and possess attractive properties such as
low melting points, high elasticity and biodegradability
(Jiang et al. 2006). However, the main bands and peaks
of the FTIR and 1
H NMR spectra from the polymers
extracted using both extraction procedures (via chloro-
form and via acetone) correspond to the characteristic
ones of PHB homopolymer, a short-chain-length (scl)
PHA, according to the literature (Oliveira et al. 2007).
These results together with the GC analysis indicate that
B. megaterium uyuni S29 produces and accumulates not
other PHA but PHB homopolymer from glucose as sole
carbon substrate, matching with the results from the pre-
liminary study of polymer characterization with strain
B. megaterium strain uyuni S29 (Rodr ıguez-Contreras
et al. 2013).