Tohoku Univ. Technology: Highly Dispersible Filamentous Fungi with Reduced Adhesion and Aggregation to Culture Tank Equipment: T23-061

Improved in-tank environment + energy & cost-saving cultivation → Enabling high-performance, high-density culture and fermentation

Filamentous fungi represented by Aspergillus oryzae have higher production capacity of proteins and complex low-molecular compounds than bacteria and yeast, and are utilized for industrial production of a wide variety of useful substances by fermentation. However, in liquid culture, hyphae entangle and clump together, and there is a limit to high-density culture and increased production of useful substances by maximizing the space of the culture tank. Highly dispersible filamentous fungi (AGΔ-GAGΔ, see Related Inventions and Documents), which drastically reduce the viscosity of the culture solution and the formation of clumps, is a technology to solve these problems. On the other hand, even in the case of AGΔ-GAGΔ, the adhesion of the fungus to the inner structure of the culture tank, such as the inner wall of the culture tank and the agitation blade/shaft, is observed as in the case of the wild strain, and it remains to be solved in order to achieve further improvement of the productivity. The present invention relates to a new highly dispersible filamentous fungus AGΔ-GAGΔ-ΔrolA strain, in which a deletion mutation of the rolA gene encoding the surface-active protein is additionally introduced into AGΔ-GAGΔ strain. Compared with the AGΔ-GAGΔ strain, the adhesion to the inner structure of the culture tank is suppressed, and the productivity is also improved. In addition, the reduction of the agitation power and the cultivation time are also obtained by the reduction of the viscosity of the culture solution in a large-scale real machine (tank).

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