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Production and characterization of a group of bioemulsifiers from the marine Bacillus velezensis strain H3

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Abstract

Marine microbes are a rich source of bioactive compounds, such as drugs, enzymes, and biosurfactants. To explore the bioactive compounds from our marine natural product library, an oil emulsification assay was applied to discover biosurfactants and bioemulsifiers. A spore-forming bacterial strain from sea mud was found to produce bioemulsifiers with good biosurfactant activity and a broad spectrum of antimicrobial properties. It was identified as Bacillus velezensis H3 using genomic and phenotypic data analysis. This strain was able to produce biosurfactants with an optimum emulsification activity at pH 6.0 and 2% NaCl by using starch as the carbon source and ammonium sulfate as the nitrogen source. The emulsification-guided isolation and purification procedure led to the discovery of the biosurfactant components, which were mainly composed of nC14-surfactin and anteisoC15-surfactin as determined by NMR and MS spectra. These compounds can reduce the surface tension of phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) from 71.8 to 24.8 mN/m. The critical micelle concentrations (CMCs) of C14-surfactin and C15-surfactin in 0.1 M PBS (pH 8.0) were determined to be 3.06 × 10-5 and 2.03 × 10-5 mol/L, respectively. The surface tension values at CMCs for C14-surfactin and C15-surfactin were 25.7 and 27.0 mM/m, respectively. In addition, the H3 biosurfactant exhibited antimicrobial activities against Staphyloccocus aureus, Mycobacterium, Klebsiella peneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Candida albicans. Thus B. velezensis H3 is an alternative surfactin producer with potential application as an industrial strain for the lipopeptide production.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by grants from China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (20080440545), National Natural Science Foundation of China (30700015), National 863 project (2006AA09Z402), Chinese Academy of Sciences Innovation Projects (O62A131BB4), and the National Science & Technology Pillar Program (200703295000-02). L.-X. Z. received funding from the Hundred Talents Program.

The authors thank Michael Goodfellow, Elizabeth Ashforth, Haian Fu, and Simon Baker for their constructive and useful comments. The authors are grateful to Zhenyang Yu for the evaluation of the stability of the surface tension of H3 biosurfactants. The authors are indebted to the National Center of Biomedical Analysis, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences for the ESI Q-TOF MS analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Xiangyang Liu, Biao Ren, Ming Chen, Xianlong Zhou, Huanqin Dai, Fuhang Song, Mei Liu, Jian Wang & Lixin Zhang

  2. Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Biao Ren & Jian Wang

  3. Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, Taizhou, 318000, China

    Haibin Wang & Jidong Wang

  4. Department of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Pharmaceutics, Poona College of Pharmacy, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, Erandwane, Pune, 411038, India

    Chandrakant R. Kokare

  5. South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China

    Jian Wang & Lixin Zhang

  6. Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Shujin Wang

  7. Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, 510663, China

    Lixin Zhang

  8. School of Life Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Ming Chen

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  1. Xiangyang Liu
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Correspondence to Lixin Zhang.

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X. Liu, B. Ren and M. Chen contributed equally to the work.

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Liu, X., Ren, B., Chen, M. et al. Production and characterization of a group of bioemulsifiers from the marine Bacillus velezensis strain H3. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 87, 1881–1893 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-010-2653-9

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