High-throughput system for screening of Cephalosporin C high-yield strain by 48-deep-well microtiter plates

Improvement of microbial strains for the high-production of industrial products has been the hallmark of all commercial fermentation processes. Strain improvement has been conventionally achieved through mutation and selection. However, most of the screenings were performed in shake flasks, which made the screening procedure very complex, time-consuming, and inefficient. Most mutant spore suspension had no chance to be screened due to the low-throughput of shake flasks and had to be sacrificed. In this paper, in order to get a Cephalosporin C (CPC) high-yield stain, traditional mutagenesis was employed to obtain the mutant library and gave them the equal screening chance by a novel mixture culture method combined with high-throughput screening method. The good correlation of fermentation results between differing-scale cultivations confirmed the feasibility of utilizing the 48-deep microtiter plates as a scale-down tool instead of shake flasks for culturing high-aerobic microbes with long cultivation period. The microbioassay based on the antibacterial activity of CPC against Alcaligenes faecalis was used to select mutants. As a result, the high-yield strain W-6 was successfully screened out and the CPC titer was nearly 50 % higher than that of the parental strain in the shake flask. The CPC production of strain W-6 was further validated in 50 l bioreactor, and the CPC production reached 32.0 g/l, twofold higher than that of the wild strain.