Using a medium of free amino acids to produce penicillin g acylase in fed-batch cultivations of Bacillus megaterium ATCC 14945

Improving Bioprocess Conditions for the Production of Prodigiosin Using a Marine Serratia rubidaea Strain

The enormous potential attributed to prodigiosin regarding its applicability as a natural pigment and pharmaceutical agent justifies the development of sound bioprocesses for its production. Using a Serratia rubidaea strain isolated from a shallow-water hydrothermal vent, optimization of the growth medium composition was carried out. After medium development, the bacterium temperature, light and oxygen needs were studied, as was growth inhibition by product concentration. The implemented changes led to a 13-fold increase in prodigiosin production in a shake flask, reaching 19.7 mg/L. The conditions allowing the highest bacterial cell growth and prodigiosin production were also tested with another marine strain: S. marcescens isolated from a tide rock pool was able to produce 15.8 mg/L of prodigiosin. The bioprocess with S. rubidaea was scaled up from 0.1 L shake flasks to 2 L bioreactors using the maintenance of the oxygen mass transfer coefficient (kLa) as the scale-up criterion. The implemented parameters in the bioreactor led to an 8-fold increase in product per biomass yield and to a final concentration of 293.1 mg/L of prodigiosin in 24 h.

Optimization of a medium composition for the heterologous production of Alcaligenes faecalis penicillin G acylase in Bacillus megaterium

Penicillin G acylase (PGA) is a strategic enzyme in the production processes of beta-lactam antibiotics. High demand for β-lactam semisynthetic antibiotics explain the genetic and biochemical engineering strategies devoted towards novel ways for PGA production and application. This work presents a fermentation process for the heterologous production of PGA from Alcaligenes faecalis in Bacillus megaterium with optimization. The thermal stability from A. faecalis PGA is considerably higher than other described PGA and the recombinant enzyme is secreted to the culture medium by B. megaterium, which facilitates the separation and purification steps. Media optimization using fractional factorial design experiments was used to identify factors related to PGA activity detection in supernatant and cell lysates. The optimized medium resulted in almost 6-fold increased activity in the supernatant samples when compared with the basal medium. Maximum enzyme activity in optimized medium composition achieves values between 135 and 140 IU/ml. The results suggest a promising model for recombinant production of PGA in B. megaterium with possible extracellular expression of the active enzyme.

Exploitation of E. coli for the production of penicillin G amidase: a tool for the synthesis of semisynthetic β-lactam antibiotics

BACKGROUND

Penicillin G amidase/acylases from microbial sources is a unique enzyme that belongs to the N-terminal nucleophilic hydrolase structural superfamily. It catalyzes the selective hydrolysis of side chain amide/acyl bond of penicillins and cephalosporins whereas the labile amide/acyl bond in the β-lactam ring remains intact. This review summarizes the production aspects of PGA from various microbial sources at optimized conditions. The minimal yield from wild strains has been extensively improved using varying strain improvement techniques like recombination and mutagenesis; further applied for the subsequent synthesis of 6-aminopenicillanic acid, which is an intermediate molecule for synthesis of a wide range of novel β-lactam antibiotics. Immobilization of PGA has also been attempted to enhance the durability of enzyme for the industrial purposes.

SHORT CONCLUSION

The present review provides an emphasis on exploitation of E. coli to enhance the microbial production of PGA. The latest achievements in the production of recombinant enzymes have also been discussed. Besides E. coli, other potent microbial strains with PGA activity must be explored to enhance the yields.

Biotechnological advances on penicillin G acylase: pharmaceutical implications, unique expression mechanism and production strategies

In light of unrestricted use of first-generation penicillins, these antibiotics are now superseded by their semisynthetic counterparts for augmented antibiosis. Traditional penicillin chemistry involves the use of hazardous chemicals and harsh reaction conditions for the production of semisynthetic derivatives and, therefore, is being displaced by the biosynthetic platform using enzymatic transformations. Penicillin G acylase (PGA) is one of the most relevant and widely used biocatalysts for the industrial production of β-lactam semisynthetic antibiotics. Accordingly, considerable genetic and biochemical engineering strategies have been devoted towards PGA applications. This article provides a state-of-the-art review in recent biotechnological advances associated with PGA, particularly in the production technologies with an emphasis on using the Escherichia coli expression platform.

Getting the big beast to work--systems biotechnology of Bacillus megaterium for novel high-value proteins

The high industrial relevance of the soil bacterium Bacillus megaterium as host for recombinant proteins is driving systems-wide analyses of its metabolic and regulatory networks. The present review highlights novel systems biology tools available to unravel the various cellular components on the level of metabolic and regulatory networks. These provide a rational platform for systems metabolic engineering of B. megaterium. In line, a number of interesting studies have particularly focused on studying recombinant B. megaterium in its industrial bioprocess environment thus integrating systems metabolic engineering with systems biotechnology and providing the full picture toward optimal processes.

Production of alkaline protease by Pseudomonas aeruginosa using proteinaceous solid waste generated from leather manufacturing industries

Animal fleshing (ANFL), the major proteinaceous solid waste discharged from leather manufacturing industries was used as the substrate for the production of alkaline protease by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The strain isolated from the tannery wastewater was selected for its ability to produce protease of activity in the range 1160-1175 U ml(-1). The selective removal of non-fibrillar proteins such as albumin and globulin from ANFL by the protease enzyme during the progress of hydrolysis was confirmed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The breakdown of ANFL was also confirmed from the amino acid release into the fermentation medium by P. aeruginosa using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).

Online filtering of CO2 signals from a bioreactor gas outflow using a committee of constructive neural networks

This work proposes a committee of Cascade Correlation neural networks as an online smoother for random measurement noise. The goals of this paper are twofold: first it intends to explore the possibilities of using a constructive neural network algorithm to learn how to filter typical noisy data from a bioreactor, CO(2) mol fractions of the effluent gas during the aerobic cultivation of Bacillus megaterium to produce the enzyme penicillin G acylase. Second, to propose a committee of such networks for achieving more realistic results, capturing the inherent trend of the process. In order to do that this paper discusses the advantages of using a constructive neural network algorithm, describes how the committee of NNs operates and evaluates its performance using real CO(2) online data obtained in laboratorial experiments. The paper also presents results obtained with classical filtering algorithms, for comparison.

Comparing the performance of multilayer perceptrons networks and neuro-fuzzy systems for on-line inference of Bacillus megaterium cellular concentrations

Penicillin G acylase (PGA) is one of the most important enzymes for the pharmaceutical industry. Bacillus megaterium has the advantage of producing extra-cellular PGA. This work compares two neural networks (NNs) architectures for on-line inference of B. megaterium cell mass in an aerated stirred tank bioreactor, during the production of PGA. Nowadays, intelligent computing tools such as artificial NNs and fuzzy logic are commonly applied for state inference and modeling of bioreactors. Combining these two approaches in hybrid, neuro-fuzzy systems, may be advantageous. Our results indicate that a neuro-fuzzy inference system showed a better performance to infer cell concentrations, when compared to multilayer perceptrons networks.