Paper accepted: “A bottom-up approach towards a bacterial consortium for the biotechnological conversion of chitin to L-lysine”

Today, the main paper of our past “F2F” project was accepted for publication in the journal Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology. In this project, three academic partners teamed up with two small companies to begin developing a biotechnological process for the utilisation of the spent fungal mycelium of Aspergillus niger that is a waste by-product of e.g. large-scale fermentative production of enzymes. One of the commercial partners was WeissBioTech, a company producing enzymes e.g. for the food industry. To set up and manage the project, WBT hired our alumna Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister to build up a small research unit within the company. Our idea was to establish a bacterial consortium consisting of a substrate converter E. coli strain degrading chitin from the fungal cell walls to yield acetate for its own growth and glucosamine for growth of the second bacterium, e.g. a C. glutamicum strain producing amino acids. The three academic partners were our lab, that of Prof. Bodo Philipp from the Institute for Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology of our University, and that of Prof. Volker Wendisch from the Institute of Genetics of Prokaryotes, from the University of Bielefeld. Marina Vortmann from our group identified and characterised the enzymes required, collaborating closely with Anna Stumpf from the microbiology group who constructed the substrate converter strain, and Elvira Sgobba from the Bielefeld group who constructed the producer strain. Finally, Dr. Martin Krehenbrink from the IMMB start-up company Cysal designed an alternative Ralstonia producer strain for the production of dipeptides. Marina, Anna, and Elvira have all long obtained their doctoral degrees for the research work they did in the framework of F2F, but building the manuscript from the large amount of data and knowledge generated during this complex project took rather long. All the happier we are that the manuscript was very well received by the reviewers and that we will now finally see it in print.