Bacterial Cellulose (BC), produced by many bacteria specially those belonging to the Gluconacetobacter
genus, is a very peculiar cellulose form that bears unique mechanical and
structural properties that can be exploited in numerous applications. However, the production
costs of BC are very high because of the use of quite expensive culture media. In this
sense, the purpose of this work was to evaluate the possibility of use residues from the olive
oil production industry as nutrient and carbon source for the production of BC by Gluconacetobacter
sacchari. The dry olive mill residue (DOR) was submitted to water extraction at 40
and 100 C (DOR40 and DOR100) and to hydrolysis with H2SO4 1M (DOR100H) in order to
obtain sugar rich aqueous extracts to be used for BC production. The BC production obtained
without addiction of any type of nutrients was 0.81 g L1 for DOR40 and 0.85 g L1 for
DOR100 after 96 h incubation, which corresponded respectively to 32 and 34% of the production
achieved with conventional HS culture medium (around 2.5 g L1). In order to
enhance the production of BC, the residues were supplemented with nitrogen (N) and
phosphate (P) sources to overcome possible nutritional limitations. It was verified an increase
on the BC production between 21.5% (N8 P4,5) and 43.2% (N1 P8) when compared with
no supplementation. These are promising results to overcome high BC production costs