Production of Arginine by Fermentation

Abstract

Studies on the production of L-arginine by fermentation using mutants of Corynebacterium (Brevibacterium), Bacillus, and Serratia have been conducted since the 1960s. More recently, the breeding of L-arginine production strains by gene recombination techniques using Escherichia coli has been investigated. To produce L-arginine efficiently by fermentation, it is necessary to breed strains with a strong biosynthetic pathway to L-arginine. Because L-arginine is biosynthesized from the precursor L-glutamic acid through ornithine and citrulline, the use of strains with a high capability for producing L-glutamic acid is desirable. Corynebacterium (Brevibacterium), which is well known in the production of L-glutamic acid, was selected as a starting strain for the breeding of an L-arginine producer and has been used on a commercial scale. Regarding the fermentation conditions, as for other amino acids, L-arginine fermentation is controlled by regulating pH near the neutral point. Due to its high oxygen requirement, L-arginine production is seriously impaired without sufficient oxygen. Advanced purification methods are necessary to obtain highly pure L-arginine from the fermentation broth. After fermentation is complete, bacterial cells and proteins are removed by means of a membrane or centrifugation, and impurities are removed by means of an ion-exchange resin or activated carbon. Highly pure L-arginine crystals can be obtained through concentration at the end of the process.

Site-directed mutagenesis and feedback-resistant N-acetyl-L-glutamate kinase (NAGK) increase Corynebacterium crenatum L-arginine production

“…The microbial production of L-arginine by Corynebacterium sp. has been studied and now most L-arginine has been produced by the direct fermentation method (Utagawa 2004;Glansdorff and Xu 2007;Ikeda et al 2009). During the nearly 30 years, most amino acid producing bacterial strains have been constructed by random mutagenesis.…”

“…1 Outline of pathways for L-arginine biosynthesis from Lglutamate. Dotted lines indicate feedback inhibition prokaryotes has been used to engineer L-arginine over-producing strains amenable to industrial exploitation (Lu 2006;Utagawa 2004;Glansdorff and Xu 2007;Ikeda et al 2009). …”

Amino acids production focusing on fermentation technologies – A review

“…glutamicum is an aerobic non-pathogenic Gram positive soil bacterium, widely used in the amino acid production industry and it represents the main amino acids producing bacterium. C. glutamicum is used for the production of several amino acids such as L-glutamate, Llysine, L-phenylalanine (Hermann, 2003), L-threonine (Kumagai, 2000), L-tryptophan (Leuchtenberger et al, 2005), L-serine, L-proline, L-glutamine, L-arginine (Utagawa, 2004) and L-isoleucine. It prefers glucose as carbon source (Eggeling and Bott, 2005), but it can utilize also other sugars such as sucrose, fructose, ribose, mannose and maltose (Zahoor et al, 2012).…”

Over-expression of NAD kinase in <i>Corynebacterium crenatum</i> and its Impact on L-Arginine Biosynthesis

“…Bacterial fermentation from natural carbon sources is currently the major approach to industrial scale production of L-arginine [1,3,4]. Corynebacterium crenatum SYPA5-5 is an aerobic, Gram-positive, non-sporulating, and L-histidine auxotroph industrial bacterium was isolated from soil and mutated by UV in our previous work [7].…”