Fungal fermentations

By-Products. The biomass from the fungal fermentation process is called mycellium and can be used as a supplement for animal feed since it contains digestable nutrients (25,26). The lime-sulfuric purification and recovery process results in large quantities of calcium sulfate cake, which is usually disposed of into a landfill but can find limited use in making plaster, cement, waUboard, or as an agricultural soil conditioner. The Hquid extraction purification and recovery process has the advantage of Htde soHd by-products. 

Some very nice engineering and experimental work was performed by Pollard et al. in measuring a fungal fermentation in real time.21 The work was performed on a 75-1 fermentor and showed detection limits for fructose, glutamate, and proline in production matrices of 0.1,0.5, and 0.5 g/1, respectively. Glucose and phosphate were measured in a 280-1 pilot scale batch with detection limits for both of 0.1 g/1. 

Itaconic Acid. Structurally an a-substituted methacrylic acid, itaconic acid constitutes a C5 building block with significant market opportunities. It is currently produced via fungal fermentation at about 10,000 t/a and mainly used as a specialty comonomer in acrylic or methacrylic resins, as incorporation of small amounts of itaconic acid into polyacrylonitrile significantly improve their dyeability. 

Subsequently, a second, closely related molecule—lovastatin—was discovered by scientists at Merck in the United States in another fungal fermentation broth and by Sankyo in Japan. Lovastatin, marketed as Mevacor in the United States, proved both safe and efficacious for the intended nse and was the first statin to be approved for human use. Several others, some mentioned above, followed. The history of discovery and development of HMGR inhibitors has been pnUed together by Jonathan Tobert, who led the lovastatin and simvastatin clinical development effort at Merck. ... 

D.J. Pollard, R. Buccino, N.C. Connors, T.F. Kirschner, R.C. Olewinski, K. Saini and P.M. Salmon, Real-time analyte monitoring of a fungal fermentation, at pUot scale, using in situ mid-infrared spectroscopy. Bioprocess Biosyst. Eng., 24(1), 13-24 (2001). 

Thus chitin is abunckmt in the sea, in diatom blooms and in the zooplankton, most notably in the shoals of krill and on the land, in invertebrates and in fungi in the soil. Potential industrial sources are wastes from shrimps and crabs, krill, squid, clams and oysters, and fungal fermentations (13). The krUl fishery alone produces 3000 tons per year, currently going to waste. 

The effects of fungal fermentation on the moisture adsorption and retention properties of defatted peanut flour have been reported (28). At 8 and 21OC, little difference was noted between the moisture contents of freeze-dried ferments and untreated samples equilibrated at relative humidities ranging from 14 to 75%. However, marked changes were noted above 75% equilibrium relative humidity (ERH), where the control samples did not adsorb as much moisture as did the ferments. These differences were attributed to an increased ratio of exposed hydrophilic to hydrophobic groups resulting from fermentation. 

This vitamin is not synthesized in animals, but rather it results from the bacterial or fungal fermentation in the rumen, after which it is absorbed and concentrated during metabolism. Among the known vitamins, this exclusive microbial synthesis is of great interest. One of the major results of vitamin Bn deficiency is pernicious anemia. This disease, however, usually does not result from a dietary deficiency of the vitamin, but rather by an absence of a glycoprotein ( gastric intrinsic factor ) in the gastric juices that facilitates absorption of the vitamin in the intestine. Control of the diseases hence is either by injection of Bn or by oral administration of the intrinsic factor, with or without the vitamin injection. 

In the 1970s two structural classes of fungal fermentation products were discovered in screening programs for antifungal agents (1) the... 

The average volumetric productivity of artemisinin, the amount of product generated divided by culture volume and by culture age at harvest, was calculated for the most successful gas feed cultures. Those were the cultures fed 32.5% 02 and 1.14% C02. In Table 4 this volumetric productivity is compared with productivities in a fungal fermentation, several phytoproduction processes reported in the literature and greenhouse-grown A. annua plants. Clearly, the productivity achieved in this work was extremely low, even in comparison to other phytoproduction processes. Other investigators of A. annua report little success producing artemisinin from cell cultures [70]. 

Fungal fermentations, such as those of Trichoderma or Aspergillus sp., lend themselves particularly well to cell separation by filtration through a rotary drum vacuum filter because of the ease with which the fungal mat can be shaved off by the drum s knife, renewing the filter cake surface to maintain high filtration flux. 

Finally, fermentation of endophytic fungi from higher plants has also been considered for the production of plant natural products. Fungal fermentation is much simpler than plant tissue culture but, at least for paclitaxel, production by fermentation of various Taxus endophytic fungi was lower compared with that of plant cells.35... 

Acid Proteases in Fungal Fermentations. Soy beans and cereals are fermented by a variety of organisms to give different products used... 

A Pestalotia species of fungus, isolated from the surface of the brown alga Rosenvingea sp. from Bahamas, produced a chlorinated benzophenone antibiotic pestalone 175 only when a unicellular marine bacterium was co-cultured in the fungal fermentation. This compound... 

Oxygen supply In fungal fermentation oxygen plays an important role in lactic acid production as this fermentation is an aerobic process. 

Antibody fragments and fusion proteins can also be produced cost-effectively in large-scale production using yeasts or fungal fermentations. An extensive knowledge covering the upstream and downstream... 

The production of fuU-sized antibodies is restricted to mammahan cell systems that possess the correct production and glycosylation machinery (see Part IV, Chapter 1). Antibody fragments, on the other hand, can also be expressed at much lower cost in microbial expression systems, such as bacterial, yeast, or fungal fermentation [49, 50]. For the high-level expression of antibody fragments, E. coli fermentation provides a well-established tech-... 

Moulds and fungi consist of filaments or masses of filaments of one cell in width which initially extend as hyphae, branch and grow and form a readily visible colony mass known as mycelium. This in turn produces spores on the surface either by sporangium or conidiospores, or by a process of reproduction. Moulds can produce enzymes which break down surrounding substances, which can be then adsorbed as a food. Some acids can be made by fungal fermentation. Such acidic excretions can lead to corrosion of metal-based materials. Moulds require similar conditions of growth to bacteria, except that high RH is necessary rather than liquid water. Properties of moulds are as follows. 

Vitamins can be produced by microbial and fungal fermentation (e.g., vitamin B2, tibose and vitamin Bi2). 

Repeated chromatographic separations of the yew extract, followed by fungal fermentations using these individual components as media amendments, indicated that specific compounds were responsible for higher taxoid production levels. CIEIA analysis of these yew components indicated that these titer promoters are not taxoid in nature. 

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