화학공학소재연구정보센터
Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, Vol.104, No.16, 6991-7003, 2020
Production of the anticancer drug taxol by the endophytic fungusEpicoccum nigrumTXB502: enhanced production by gamma irradiation mutagenesis and immobilization technique
Taxol, a phyto-extracted diterpenoid, is the most commercially needed drug in cancer chemotherapy. In spite of the microbial production of taxol being successful and prospective, the reported yields are still not sufficient for large-scale production. Thus, the discovery of new taxol-producing microbial strains and production enhancement methodologies such as process optimization, strain improvement, and immobilization technique are the main objectives. In this paper, a taxol-producing start strainEpicoccum nigrumTXB502 (initial yield 61.35 mu g L-1) was isolated fromTaxus baccataand identified by morphological and molecular tools. The optimum cultivation and nutritional conditions were assessed by testing one parameter at a time approach that resulted in 88.59% significant production increase. In addition, a stable mutant with improved productivity (40.07% yield increase in comparison with the parent strain) was successfully developed after gamma irradiation mutagenesis of the start strain. The taxol titer was further improved via testing different immobilization carriers for both spores and mycelia of this mutant. Over taxol production was achieved using alginate-immobilized mycelia with the feasibility of conducting six successive production cycles in a semi-continuous form. The final total concentration reached 8187.77 mu g taxol 6 L(-1)which represents approximately 22-fold increase, as compared to the initial titer of the start strain. These findings can pave the way for the prospective industrial manufacturing of taxol, as the achieved taxol production in this study is the highest reported by academic laboratories for microbial cultures.