A New Medium for Improving Spinosad Production by Saccharopolyspora spinosa

Spinosad (a mixture of spinosyns A and D) is a unique natural pesticide produced by Saccharopolyspora spinosa. With regard to attempts to improve S. spinosa by classical mutagenesis, we propose that the bottleneck of screening out high-spinosad-production strains is probably caused by the fermentation media.

The current study aimed to identify a new medium to extensively investigate the potential of S. spinosa strains to produce spinosad.

Statistical and regressive modeling methods were used to investigate the effects of the carbon source and to optimize the production media.

The spinosad production of S. spinosa Co121 increased 77.13%, from 310.44 ± 21.84 μg/mL in the initial fermentation medium (with glucose as the main carbon source) to 549.89 ± 38.59 μg/mL in a new optimized fermentation medium (98.0 g of mannitol, 43.0 g of cottonseed flour, 12.9 g of corn steep liquor, 0.5 g of KH2PO4, and 3.0 g of CaCO3 in 1 L of H2O; pH was adjusted to 7.0 before autoclaving). After screening 4,000 strains, an overall 3.33-fold increase was observed in spinosad titers, starting from the parental strain Co121 in the original fermentation medium and ending with the mutant strain J78 (1035 ± 34 μg/mL) in the optimized medium.

The optimized fermentation medium developed in this study can probably be used to improve spinosad production in screening industrial strains of S. spinosa.