Lantibiotics such as gallidermin are lanthionine-containing polypeptide antibiotics produced by grampositive bacteria that might become relevant for the treatment of various infectious diseases. So far, selftoxicity has prevented the isolation of efficient overproducing strains, thus hampering their thorough investigation and preventing their exploitation in fields other than the food area. We wanted to investigate the effect of lantibiotic precursor peptides on the producing strains in order to evaluate novel strategies for the overproduction of these promising peptides. In this study, gallidermin was chosen as a representative example of the type A lantibiotics. A Staphylococcus gallinarum Tü3928 mutant, whose gene for the extracellular pregallidermin protease GdmP was replaced by a kanamycin-resistance gene, was constructed. Mass spectrometry (MS) analysis indicated that this mutant produced fully posttranslationally modified gallidermin precursors with truncated versions of the leader peptide, but not the entire leader as predicted from the gdmA sequence. In filter-on-plate assays, these truncated pregallidermins showed no toxicity against Staphylococcus gallinarum Tü3928 up to a concentration of 8 g/liter (corresponding to approximately 2.35 mM), while gallidermin produced clear inhibitory zones at concentrations as low as 0.25 g/liter (0.12 mM). We showed that the lack of toxicity is due entirely to the presence of the truncated leader, since MS as well as bioassay analysis showed that the peptides resulting from tryptic cleavage of pregallidermins and gallidermin produced by S. gallinarum Tü3928 had identical masses and approximately the same specific activity. This demonstrates that even a shortened leader sequence is sufficient to prevent the toxicity of mature gallidermin. In nonoptimized fermentations, the gdmP mutant produced pregallidermin to a 50%-higher molar titer, suggesting that the absence of self-toxicity has a beneficial effect on gallidermin production and giving a first confirmation of the suitability of the overproduction strategy.Antibiotic resistance has spread dramatically among pathogens throughout the last two decades. Of particular concern is the increasing emergence of multiresistant pathogens in health care settings. Nowadays, about 70% of nosocomial infections in the United States are resistant to at least one antibiotic (35), and in 2002, the first clinical isolate of Staphylococcus aureus with high-level resistance to vancomycin, a drug of last resort, was isolated (8). As the number of resistant pathogens continues to grow, the number of new antibiotics to fight them is declining steeply (37). Therefore, the development of new antimicrobial agents should be encouraged.Type A lantibiotics are cationic, amphiphilic peptides that are produced by a wide range of gram-positive bacteria and show bactericidal activity against other gram-positive bacteria. They show a dual mode of action at nanomolar concentrations which involves pore formation and inhibition of peptidoglycan biosynth...

Antigen-binding fragments (Fabs) are novel formats in the growing pipeline of biotherapeutics. Sharing similar features to monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) with regard to expression, Fabs are considered as unchallenging for upstream development. Yet for downstream processing, the mature mAb downstream purification platform is not directly applicable. New approaches need to be found to achieve a lean purification process that maintains quality, productivity, and timelines while being generically applicable independent of the expression system. In a successful collaboration, BAC BV, GE Healthcare, and Novartis Pharma AG have developed a new affinity chromatography medium (resin) suitable to support cGMP manufacturing of lambda Fabs. We show that using this novel chromatography medium for the capture step, a purification platform for lambda Fabs can be established.

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In this work, a defined medium was developed and optimized for the mutant strain Staphylococcus gallinarum DeltaP, which produces pregallidermin (PGDM), a nontoxic precursor of the lantibiotic gallidermin (GDM). The availability of a defined medium is a prerequisite for a rational process development and the investigation of medium effects on final product concentration, yield, and volumetric productivity. We identified four vitamins and three metal ions as essential for growth and PGDM production with S. gallinarum DeltaP. The strain was capable of growing without any added amino acids, but the addition of proline had a strong growth-stimulatory effect. The concentrations of all essential compounds were balanced in a continuous culture using a medium-shift technique. Based on this balanced medium, a fed-batch process was developed in which S. gallinarum DeltaP was grown up to a biomass concentration of 67 g l(-1) and produced 1.95 g l(-1) PGDM, equivalent to 0.57 mM. In the fermentation broth, we identified other GDM precursors in addition to those with a 12 or 14-amino-acid-long leader peptide that had been observed previously. Including those precursors with shorter leader sequences, the final concentration would correspond to 0.69 mM. In molar terms, this represents a roughly fourfold or fivefold increase, respectively, over established, complex medium-based gallidermin production processes (Kempf et al. 2000). With the same medium and feed protocol, the maximum concentration of mature GDM produced by wild-type S. gallinarum Tü 3928 was only 0.08 mM.

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