Incorporating Fermentation into Undergraduate Laboratory Courses

Laboratory courses in universities have a responsibility to introduce current research practices and trends in scientific research to adequately prepare students for work in the field. One such research practice gaining popularity in recent years is that of green chemistry. Since the 1960s, increasing concern over the release of toxic chemicals into the environment has led to a push for more environmentally responsible chemistry. A growing faction of chemists has begun to adopt methods to eliminate chemical waste and support green chemistry. Fermentation is an ideal technique to demonstrate environmentally sustainable chemistry in an undergraduate laboratory class. Fermentation of complex natural products, as opposed to traditional organic synthesis, is beneficial as it supports a number of principles of green chemistry; it is conducted at ambient temperature and pressure, uses inexpensive and innocuous materials, makes use of renewable resources, and does not require a fume hood. Skills implemented during fermentation can be easily taught to upper-level Chemistry and Biochemistry undergraduate students, who typically have limited exposure to complex natural products in their coursework. Such a course would be interdisciplinary in nature, incorporating fungal biology and metabolism as well as organic chemistry. Students would learn a variety of skills, including growth media selection and preparation, inoculation of fungal cultures, extraction of natural products, and purification and characterization of metabolites. Experiments of this nature would allow for discussions of several areas of research: green chemistry, natural products and their application to medicine, identification of functional groups in complex molecules by spectroscopy, and introduction to biochemistry and metabolism. Roquefortine C, a prenylated indole alkaloid readily produced by a variety of species of Penicillia, is an excellent candidate for demonstrating fermentation in a laboratory classroom setting, owing to its ease of purification from other metabolites and its unique structural features.