Abstract
Phytosterols, coming as a by-product of vegetable oils or wood pulp, contain the cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrene nucleus and can be bioconverted into steroid intermediates by removing the C17 side chain. This chapter shows the scale-up, from flask to bioreactor, of phytosterols bioconversion into 4-androstene-3,17-dione (androstenedione; AD) using Mycolicibacterium neoaurum B-3805. Due to the fact that phytosterols and AD are nearly insoluble in water, two-phase systems and the use of chemically modified cyclodextrins have been described as methods to solve it. Here, we use a water–oil two-phase system that allows the bioconversion of up to 20 g/L of phytosterols into AD in 5 L and 20 L bioreactors.
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Acknowledgments
This work was fully supported by grants of the European Union program ERA-IB [MySterI (EIB.12.010)] and ERA CoBioTech for the project Syntheroids. MySterI funding was received through the APCIN call of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO, Spain) (PCIN-2013-024-C02-01). Syntheroids funding was received from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No [722361] and financed through the Center for the Industrial Technology Development (CDTI, Spain) (EXP-00108753/SERA-20181033). The authors want to thank the European Union programs ERA-IB and ERA CoBioTech, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO, Spain), and the Center for the Industrial Technology Development (CDTI, Spain), as well as the MySterI Consortium (INBIOTEC, Pharmins Ltd., University of York, SINTEF, Technische Universität Dortmund, and Gadea Biopharma S.L.) and Syntheroids Consortium (INBIOTEC, Pharmins Ltd., SINTEF, Technische Universität Dortmund and Bionice S.L).
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Martínez-Cámara, S., de la Torre, M., Barredo, JL., Rodríguez-Sáiz, M. (2023). Scale-Up of Phytosterols Bioconversion into Androstenedione. In: Barreiro, C., Barredo, JL. (eds) Microbial Steroids. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2704. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3385-4_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3385-4_14
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