The high potential of Clostridium strains to synthetize industrially useful metabolites is known for a long time. However, their metabolic abilities are poorly understood. Clostridium bifermentans is a good example of such a Clostridium species. In the literature there is a lot of incoherent information about the ability of these bacteria to saccharide utilization. Simultaneously, there is no data about the metabolites which they product. In this work we demonstrated the metabolic pathways of selected saccharides in 11 strains of C. bifermentans isolated from samples collected from the natural environment, as well as in the reference strain, C. bifermentans ATCC 638. As a result, it was find out that bacteria are able to synthetize organic acids (succinic, lactic, formic, and acetic) as well as ethanol from selected saccharides. However, diols (1,3-propanediol and 2,3-butanediol) are not synthetized from saccharides by C. bifermentans. As earlier studies have shown diols are synthetized only from glycerol in the investigated strains.

Lignocellulosic biomass is widely available renewable raw material, which is an alternative for fossil fuels. The main direction of the development of the lignocellulosic materials is feeding and subsequently the production of biofuels, of which main step is degradation to free sugars. Six strains of Trichoderma fungi were assessed in terms of capability for the use of biodegradable atypical lignocellulosic waste, which is brewer’s spent grain (BSG). It was determined by the activity evaluation of five hydrolytic enzymes, and particular attention was paid to the concentration of reducing sugars released during and after propagation. High activity of fungal hydrolases was obtained in brewer’s spent grain medium. Free sugars (as equivalent of reducing sugars) reached much higher level, as compared to the pure BSG extract. The obtained results suggest a high potential of BSG as by-product to produce intermediate raw material with a high concentration of sugars by biological methods.

Proteins are the main building components of all living organisms. They show many different functions and may be a source of biologically active peptides which express a positive impact on living organisms. One of the best sources of biopeptides is food, naturally rich in protein. Common methods for obtaining biopeptides are often based on the enzymatic hydrolysis of precursor protein, fractioning and purification of the hydrolysate. The alternative approach is chemical synthesis and techniques based on the heterological expression of peptides coding sequences. The expression is used for production peptides with many different activities i.e. immunomodulating, antioxidant, antimicrobial, antihypertensive and many others.