Pichia pastoris Fermentation Services

BOC Sciences can provide a variety of microbial fermentation services using Pichia pastoris as host cells, including strain improvement, fermentation process optimization, microbial fermentation production. With our complete strain development platform and extensive experience in microbial fermentation, we are able to offer one-stop fermentation services ranging from laboratory fermentation to microbial manufacturing. Due to the potency of Pichia pastoris as an expression system for protein production, we utilize Pichia pastoris for microbial fermentation and applications in vaccines, recombinant proteins, antibody fragments, cytokines, and other fields. Our Pichia pastoris system is an efficient industrial tool that provides our customers with cost-effective microbial manufacturing.

Introduction

Pichia pastoris, abbreviated as P. pastoris, is a methanotrophic yeast, a heterotroph discovered in the 1960s. P. pastoris can survive and reproduce using different carbon sources, such as methanol, glucose, glycerol. P. pastoris exists in two cell types, haploid and diploid cells, obtained through mitosis, sporulation and meiosis, respectively. P. pastoris is a single-celled eukaryote. That being said, proteins within P. pastoris can be studied and compared homologously with other more complex eukaryotic species to understand their function and origin.

The P. pastoris has become an advanced heterologous gene expression system and is widely used to produce various heterologous proteins. The production of P. pastoris recombinant proteins is controlled by the methanol-inducible alcohol oxidase 1 (AOX1) promoter, which is characterized by methanol as a carbon and energy source. Due to its ability to serve as a model organism for genetic studies and as an protein expression system, P. pastoris has become an essential microbial strain for biological research and applications. For example, P. pastoris can functionally process large molecular weight proteins, which is useful in translation hosts.

Advantages of P. pastoris Fermentation

Culture: P. pastoris can be grown on simple, inexpensive media with fast growth rates. P. pastoris is a methylotrophic bacterium, suggesting that it can be grown with simple methanol as the sole energy source. P. pastoris can also be grown in shake flasks or fermenters, making it suitable for small-scale and large-scale production.
Growth: P. pastoris, like other widely used yeast models, has a relatively short lifespan and fast regeneration time. P. pastoris can be grown in medium with high cell densities. This feature is compatible with the expression of heterologous proteins and allows the production of higher yields.
Production: The P. pastoris expression system is capable of producing high concentrations of heterologous proteins. P. pastoris is easy to manipulate genetically, and a wide range of vectors and strains are available. This eukaryote also has the potential to produce soluble and correctly folded recombinant proteins with post-translational modification (PTM), such as N-glycosylation. The target protein function may require eukaryotic processing that is not available in prokaryotes.

Applications of P. pastoris Fermentation

P. pastoris is a model organism used for genomic studies and genetic analysis. It is a single-cell eukaryote capable of complex eukaryotic genetic processing in a relatively small genome. Due to its ability to recombine with foreign DNA and process large proteins, P. pastoris can be engineered as a transformation host for new proteins production.
Based on the characteristics of P. pastoris, it has been successfully used to produce a large number of biopharmaceuticals and industrial enzymes. In the pharmaceutical industry, high cell density fermentation of P. pastoris enables the production of large amounts of highly active and low-cost recombinant proteins. In addition, P. pastoris is capable of proteins glycosylation for biotherapeutics. In the food industry, P. pastoris is used to produce different kinds of enzymes as food additives with many functions.

Project Workflow

Customer advisory
Project discussion
P. pastoris served as host cell
Strain improvement and fermentation development
Novel strain evaluation
Project delivery

References

Enikö Zörgö, et al. Ancient evolutionary trade-offs between yeast ploidy states, PLoS Genet, 2013, 9(3):e1003388.
Wan-Cang Liu, et al. Fed-batch high-cell-density fermentation strategies for Pichia pastoris growth and production, Crit. Rev. Biotechnol, 2019, 39, 258-271.
Corinna Rebnegger, et al. Pichia pastoris Exhibits High Viability and a Low Maintenance Energy Requirement at Near-Zero Specific Growth Rates, Appl Environ Microbiol, 2016, 82(15):4570-4583.