Research Article Improvement of Medium Chain Fatty Acid Content and Antimicrobial Activity of Coconut Oil via Solid-State Fermentation Using a Malaysian Geotrichum candidum

Copyright © 2013 Anahita Khoramnia et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Coconut oil is a rich source of beneficial medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs) particularly lauric acid. In this study, the oil was modified into a value-added product using direct modification of substrate through fermentation (DIMOSFER) method. A coconut-based and coconut-oil-added solid-state cultivation using aMalaysian lipolyticGeotrichum candidumwas used to convert the coconut oil into MCFAs-rich oil. Chemical characteristics of the modified coconut oils (MCOs) considering total medium chain glyceride esters were compared to those of the normal coconut oil using ELSD-RP-HPLC. Optimum amount of coconut oil hydrolysis was achieved at 29%moisture content and 10.14 % oil content after 9 days of incubation, where the quantitative amounts of the modified coconut oil and MCFA were 0.330mL/g of solid media (76.5 % bioconversion) and 0.175mL/g of solid media (53% of the MCO), respectively. MCOs demonstrated improved antibacterial activity mostly due to the presence of free lauric acid. The highest MCFAs-rich coconut oil revealed as much as 90 % and 80 % antibacterial activities against Staphylococcus aureus an