New publication published in Scientific Reports

Anton Lindig and his co-authors are investigating the influence of cultivation systems on the discovery of new natural substances. Natural products, i.e. chemical compounds from microorganisms, plants or animals, are important starting points for new drugs. However, their discovery and investigation are very sensitive to environmental and process conditions. Even small differences in oxygen content or nutrient composition can greatly alter the metabolism and make reliable reproduction difficult. Anton Lindig has investigated how three cultivation systems - shake flasks (BSF), flower plates (48 FP) and a stirred tank bioreactor (STR) - affect the metabolism of the bacterium Streptomyces griseochromogenes. By adjusting the process parameters such as ethanol concentration and oxygen supply, the consistency in the metabolic footprint of the bacterium in the three cultivation systems was significantly increased. The analysis showed that it is primarily the cell morphology that determines how reproducible the metabolic profile is. A multidimensional optimization of the process parameters thus significantly improves scalability and opens up new possibilities for the discovery of previously unknown natural products.

You can find the publication here