Trichoderma Reesei Fermentation Services

With rich microbial fermentation experience and an advanced strain development platform, BOC Sciences can provide one-stop fermentation services based on a variety of microorganisms. Trichoderma reesei, the enzyme producer, has become an indispensable biotechnological tool for fermentation production. With our strain screening and improvement technologies, Trichoderma reesei can be transformed into the industrial strain and serve as host cells in order to produce biological products. BOC Sciences offers fermentation CDMO services encompassing laboratory fermentation, fermentation scale-up, pilot, and industrial fermentation to meet the needs of our customers at all stages of project development.

Introduction of T. reesei

Trichoderma reesei, abbreviated as T. reesei, is a mesophilic and filamentous fungus, as well as an anamorph of the fungus Hypocrea jecorina. T. reesei can secrete large numbers of cellulases and hemicellulases, which have industrial application in the hydrolyzation of cellulose and a major component of plant biomass into glucose. For years, T. reesei has been widely used to produce industrial enzymes, such as cellulases and xylanases. These enzymes produced by industrial fermentation have applications in food, animal feed, pharmaceutical, textile, pulp, and paper industries.

Over the last few decades, T. reesei has gained industrial importance due to its unparalleled enzyme production capacity. The advancement of T. reesei strains through metabolic engineering approaches may help unlock the untapped potential of T. reesei, which could further improve enzyme production and strain breeding, such as nuclear transport, transcription, mRNA stability, protein secretion, and vacuole targeting.

Advantages of T. reesei Fermentation

Culture of T. reesei

T. reesei can be cultured on inexpensive media. T. reesei can utilize lignocellulose from agricultural by-products as an inexpensive substrate, and T. reesei fermentation produces lignocellulolytic enzymes that convert plant cell wall polysaccharides into simple fermentable sugars in order to produce high value-added products.

Safety of T. reesei

Some valuable enzymes produced by T. reesei fermentation have been granted Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, including cellulase, trehalase, glucose oxidase, etc.

Applications of T. reesei Fermentation

T. reesei retains a high capability to secrete cellulolytic enzymes, which has been widely used in fermentation for the production of industrial enzymes, and specifically, for those of cellulases, xylanases, amylases, and proteases. Cellulase is complex enzyme-containing endoglucanase, exoglucanase, and β-glucosidase, which hydrolyzes cellulose to glucose. This characterizes T. reesei as an attractive microorganism for various industries, and T. reesei fermentation occupies a variety of industrial applications, from seed fermentation, improvement of animal feed quality, animal feed additive processing, food texture, brewing, and acetate processing.

T. reesei can be used as a host for biological drugs production. Nowadays, numerous medical applications have increasingly adopted protein-based therapeutic approaches. Strain improvement within the approaches of genome engineering promotes T. reesei for efficient, high-level, and low-cost protein production. Improved T. reesei strains have the ability to express large amounts of proteins that promote T. reesei as an expression host for recombinant proteins. In addition, an alternative emerging application includes the biosynthesis of human proteins. Although T. reesei cannot produce proteins with a similar pattern in relation to human glycosylation, one of its advantages is that it does not require high levels of glycosylated proteins.

Project Workflow of T. reesei Fermentation

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

References

1. Fitz E., Wanka F. and Seiboth B., The Promoter Toolbox for Recombinant Gene Expression in Trichoderma reesei, Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol., 2018, 11.
2. Rantasalo A., et al. Novel genetic tools that enable highly pure protein production in Trichoderma reesei, Sci. Rep., 2019, 9, 5032.
3. Bischof R. H., Ramoni J. and Seiboth B., Cellulases and beyond: the first 70 years of the enzyme producer Trichoderma reesei, Microb. Cell Fact., 2016, 15, 106.