Microbial Biotechnology Flashcards
What amino acids are used in the food industry?
Lysine and glutamic acid
What are the four main industry’s microbial products are included in?
Industrial and agricultural products
Food additives
Products for human and animal health (antibiotics and medicines)
Biofuels
How are the two amino acids produced?
Produced using regulatory mutants, which have reduced ability to limit synthesis of an end product
What are organic acids commonly used for?
For preservatives
What are biopolymers used for? And give an example
Used to modify flow chacteristics of liquids and to serve as gelling agents. For example lactic acid bacteria produce dextrans
What are biosurfactants and what are they used for?
They’re amphiphilic molecules. Used for emulsification, increasing detergency, wetting and phase dispersion, and solubilization.
How is bioethanol produced?
Produced from degradation of plant starches in corn by amylases and amyloglucosidases, followed by microbial fermentation of remaining sugars
What is are the negatives of using bioethanol?
Drives up production of food prices
During production it absorbs water and can’t be shipped through existing pipelines.
It has less energy in it’s bonds than other molecules, including petrol and butanol.
It may take more energy input to produce.
The positives of using hydrogen gas?
It has 3x more potential energy per unit weight than gasoline, making it the highest energy content fuel availability.
What are the negatives of using hydrogen gas?
Storage and distribution problems.
It can’t e mixed with gasoline (unlike bioethanol) to reduce petroleum use
How could hydrogen gas be produced?
Hydrogen gas can be produced as a direct product of microbial fermentation.
Oxygenic photosyntetic and anoxygenc photoheterotrophs also produce hydrogen gas.
Hydrogenase and nitrogenase enzymes both produce hydrogen gas.
How do microbes grow?
They photosynthesis to make ATP and organic food molecules provide carbon for biomass. Nitrogen is also fixed to ammonium while releasing hydrogen gas. This produces new cell material.
What must be controlled when growing microbes?
Agitation, temperature, pH changes and oxygenation
How do stirred fermenters work?
Continual addition of a critical nutrient so that microbes will not have excess substrate available at any given time. Prevents production and accumulation of undesirable metabolic waste products
What are primary metabolites related to and give an example of some
Related to synthesis of microbial cells in growth phase. Include amino acids, nucleotides, fermentation end products and enzymes
What are secondary metabolites?
Accumulate following active growth. Have no direct relationship to synthesis of cell material and natural growth. Include antibiotics and mycotoxins
What is genetic manipulation used to produce and what are the classical method of doing it?
Used to produce microorganisms with new and desirable chacteristics. Classical methods of genetic exchange coupled with recombinant DNA technology, genomics and systems biology play a vital role in industrial microbiology
What are production strains?
Microbial strain currently used to generate the product of interest.
How can mutation occur when using product strains?
Chemical exposure
Ultraviolet light
Transposon mutagenesis
What are the benefits of protoplast fusion?
Promotes genetic variability in microbes and plant cells.
Can fuse protoplasts of different spevies to produce new strains.
Process is currently mutagenic and promotes recombination.
What are the benefits of in vitro techniques for targeted strain construction?
may yield novel products, novel gene regulation, novel post translational modification of proteins
What is heterologous gene expression?
Functional genes cloned into different species so the production of specific products without contamination of other substances
What are the benefits of modifying gene expression?
Product yield may be increased by modification of gene reguoatory molecules.
Allows for overproduction of a product.
Antibiotics can be produced in this way
What is direct evolution?
Creates new metabolic capabilities in a given microorganism for gene of interest.
What did systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment produce?
Aptamers which is when RNA is used as a ligand with biological activity to alter specific activity of cellular targets due to tight fitting in target moecule
What are metagenomics and bioprospecting used for?
Used for the study of genetic diversity in microbes in nature that can’t be cultured.
Exploring nature for new and potentially useful microbes and products by genomics
What are biopesticides?
Biological agents such as bacteria, fungi or viruses which can be used to kill a susceptible insect
Give an example to explain agricultural biotechnology
Use of agrobacterium tumefacians. Tumor inducing (Ti) plasmid is transferred into plant cells genomes causing cancer. Now Ti is used as a vector for insertion of genes of interest for modification of crop plants.
What are biosensors?
Living microbes, enzymes or organelles are linked to electrodes to detect specific substances.
