Summary
The continuous production of gibberellic acid with immobilized mycelia of Gibberella fujikuroi was maintained over a hundred days in a tubular fixed-bed reactor. Free mycelium at the beginning of the storage phase was harvested from G. fujikuroi shake-flask culture and was immobilized by ionotropic gelation in calcium alginate beads.
The continuous recycle production system consisted of a fixed-bed reactor, a container in which the culture medium was heated, stirred and aerated, and valves for sample withdrawal or reactant addition during the first 1320 h (55 days). A two-phase continuous extractor was then added for the last 960 hours (40 days). Free and immobilized mycelium shake-flask cultures with the same strain used in the continuous culture system were also realized to compare growth, maintenance and production parameters. The results show about the same gibberellic acid productivity in both free and immobilized mycelium shakeflask cultures: 0.384 and 0.408 mgGA3·gBiomass-1 ·day-1, respectively, whereas in the continuous system the gibberellic acid production is about twice as large for a similar biomass: 0.768 mgGA3·gBiomass-1·day-1. Several factors affecting the overall productivity of the immobilized systems were found to be: the quality and the quantity of mycelia in the biocatalyst beads and the immobilization conditions.
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Saucedo, J.E.N., Barbotin, JN. & Thomas, D. Continuous production of gibberellic acid in a fixed-bed reactor by immobilized mycelia of Gibberella fujikuroi in calcium alginate beads. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 30, 226–233 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00256209
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00256209