Corynebacterium glutamicum Fermentation Services

BOC Sciences has developed a highly effective fermentation platform for producing various useful compounds. With over 20 years of experience in strain improvement and fermentation development, we can reconstruct the metabolic pathways of microorganisms using industrial microbiology techniques and afford a wide range of important biological products. Microbial strains are central for production reactions, including fermentation, biocatalysis, or enzymatic reactions. In general, Corynebacterium glutamicum is a preferred microorganism to produce large-scale amino acids in the fermentation industry. We can utilize Corynebacterium glutamicum as host cells, construct strains through metabolic engineering, and expand the range of fermented products to meet customers’ needs.

The valuable compounds that can be produced on an industrial scale by Corynebacterium glutamicum fermentation include:

• Amino acids, such as L-glutamate and L-lysine
• Terpenoids and carotenoids
• Organic acids
• Biopolymers

Introduction of C. glutamicum

Corynebacterium is a genus of Gram-positive bacteria that are mostly aerobic and widely distributed within animal microbiota. They are usually not pathogenic, but several species have been revealed to cause disease in animals or humans. The species of Corynebacterium are rod-shaped bacteria, linear or slightly curved, between 2 and 6 µm in size, peroxidase-positive, non-sporulating, and are aerobic or partly anaerobic chemoorganotrophs. Corynebacteria grow relatively slowly on enriched media and require biotin or other nutrient requirements for growth.

Corynebacterium glutamicum, abbreviated as C. glutamicum, is a non-pathogenic soil bacterium belonging to Actinomycetales, a non-pathogenic species of genus Corynebacterium that has important industrial applications. C. glutamicum is considered a major industrial strain for amino acid production. It was first isolated in the 1950s from Japanese soil searching for a natural L-glutamic acid producer.

Advantages of C. glutamicum Fermentation

• Culture: C. glutamicum fermentation can utilize various carbon sources for growth and energy supply, including sugars such as glucose, fructose, ribose, sucrose, maltose, etc., alcohols such as inositol or ethanol, organic acids such as propionate, lactate, acetate, and gluconate, and some amino acids. In addition, C. glutamicum can also utilize alternative carbon sources through metabolic engineering, ranging from starch, lactose, glycerol, and components of lignocellulosic waste, among others.
• Production: C. glutamicum fermentation can produce large-scale food and feed amino acids such as L-glutamic acid and L-lysine. This microorganism has shown its efficacy through genetic modification in utilizing both hexoses and pentoses from biomass hydrolysis products to produce value-added products that include amino acids and polyamines, which characterizes it as a preferred strain for biomass conversion.
• Safety: In addition to the production of amino acids, C. glutamicum has been improved to produce carotenoids that can be widely used as natural source pigments in food or nutraceutical additives. For a long time, C. glutamicum has been used as a Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) organism in the fermentation industry.

Applications of C. glutamicum Fermentation

Non-pathogenic species of Corynebacterium are used for important industrial applications such as the production of amino acids, nucleotides, and other nutritional factors, biotransformation of steroids, etc. C. glutamicum is one of the most studied species and further developed as an important organism for the biotechnology industry in order to produce food additive grade amino acids. C. glutamicum fermentation plays an important role in industrial production, which is also used to produce diamines, organic acids, carotenoids, proteins, and biopolymers.

C. glutamicum has been used in the biosynthesis of terpenoids, such as carotenoids (also called tetraterpenoids). Traditionally, terpenoids have been used in the feed, food, and nutraceutical industries. Due to the complex structure of terpenoids, large-scale chemical synthesis is often difficult or costly, and the isolation of terpenoids from natural sources often does not yield sufficient quantities, but microbial production processes offer a promising alternative.

Project Workflow of C. glutamicum Fermentation

• Customer advisory
• Project discussion
• C. glutamicum served as host
• Strain improvement and fermentation development
• Novel strain evaluation
• Project delivery

References

1. Ahmed Zahoora, Steffen N. Lindnera, Volker F. Wendisch, Metabolic engineering of Corynebacterium glutamicum aimed at alternative carbon sources and new products, Comput. Struct. Biotechnol. J., 2012, 3, e201210004.
2. Joo-Young Lee, et al. The Actinobacterium Corynebacterium glutamicum, an Industrial Workhorse, J Microbiol Biotechnol., 2016, 26(5):807-22.