Kinetic characterization of a novel endo-β-N-acetylglucosaminidase on concentrated bovine colostrum whey to release bioactive glycans

EndoBI-1 is a recently isolated endo-β-N-acetylglucosaminidase, which cleaves the N-N'-diacetyl chitobiose moiety found in the N-glycan core of high mannose, hybrid and complex N-glycans. These N-glycans have selective prebiotic activity for a key infant gut microbe, Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis. The broad specificity of EndoBI-1 suggests the enzyme may be useful for many applications, particularly for deglycosylating milk glycoproteins in dairy processing. To facilitate its commercial use, we determined kinetic parameters for EndoBI-1 on the model substrates ribonuclease B and bovine lactoferrin, as well as on concentrated bovine colostrum whey. Km values ranging from 0.25 to 0.49, 0.43 to 1.00 and 0.90 to 3.18 mg/mL and Vmax values ranging from 3.5×10(-3) to 5.09×10(-3), 4.5×10(-3) to 7.75×10(-3) and 1.9×10(-2)to 5.2×10(-2) mg/mL×min were determined for ribonuclease B, lactoferrin and whey, respectively. In general, EndoBI-1 showed the highest apparent affinity for ribonuclease B, while the maximum reaction rate was the highest for concentrated whey. EndoBI-1-released N-glycans were quantified by a phenol-sulphuric total carbohydrate assay and the resultant N-glycan structures monitored by nano-LC-Chip-Q-TOF MS. The kinetic parameters and structural characterization of glycans released suggest EndoBI-1 can facilitate large-scale release of complex, bioactive glycans from a variety of glycoprotein substrates. Moreover, these results suggest that whey, often considered as a waste product, can be used effectively as a source of prebiotic N-glycans.

Using highly efficient nonlinear experimental design methods for optimization of Lactococcus lactis fermentation in chemically defined media

Optimization of fermentation media and processes is a difficult task due to the potential for high dimensionality and nonlinearity. Here we develop and evaluate variations on two novel and highly efficient methods for experimental fermentation optimization. The first approach is based on using a truncated genetic algorithm with a developing neural network model to choose the best experiments to run. The second approach uses information theory, along with Bayesian regularized neural network models, for experiment selection. To evaluate these methods experimentally, we used them to develop a new chemically defined medium for Lactococcus lactis IL1403, along with an optimal temperature and initial pH, to achieve maximum cell growth. The media consisted of 19 defined components or groups of components. The optimization results show that the maximum cell growth from the optimal process of each novel method is generally comparable to or higher than that achieved using a traditional statistical experimental design method, but these optima are reached in about half of the experiments (73-94 vs. 161, depending on the variants of methods). The optimal chemically defined media developed in this work are rich media that can support high cell density growth 3.5-4 times higher than the best reported synthetic medium and 72% higher than a commonly used complex medium (M17) at optimization scale. The best chemically defined medium found using the method was evaluated and compared with other defined or complex media at flask- and fermentor-scales.

Development of chemically defined media supporting high-cell-density growth of lactococci, enterococci, and streptococci

Lactococcus lactis IL1403 was used as an experimental strain to develop a chemically defined medium for study of the physiology and metabolic pathways of lactococci. An experimental leave-one-out technique was employed to determine the necessity of each of the 57 chemical components used in medium development. A statistical experimental design approach including three fractional factorial designs and a central composite design was used to optimize the fermentation process with 21 variables composed of 19 nutritional factors grouped from the 57 components and two environmental factors (initial pH and temperature). For L. lactis IL1403, the maximum biomass concentrations obtained with the two optimal chemically defined media developed in this study (ZMB1 and ZMB2) were generally 3.5- to 4-fold higher than the maximum biomass concentrations obtained with the previously described best synthetic media (SA) and 50% to 68% higher than the maximum biomass concentrations obtained with M17, a complex medium commonly used for lactococci. The new chemically defined media support high-cell-density growth of numerous strains of L. lactis, Enterococcus faecalis, and Streptococcus thermophilus.