Method for producing l-glutamine by fermentation and l-glutamine producing bacterium

Abstract

L-Glutamine is produced by culturing a coryneform bacterium which has L-glutamine producing ability and has been modified so that its intracellular glutamine synthetase activity should be enhanced, preferably which has been further modified so that its intracellular glutamate dehydrogenase activity should be enhanced, in a medium to produce and accumulate L-glutamine in the medium and collecting the L-glutamine.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] The present application is a division of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 062,458, filed on Feb. 5, 2002, which claims priority to JP 2001-28163, filed on Feb. 5, 2001, and to JP 2001-162806, filed on May 30, 2001.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] 1. Field of the Invention [0003] The present invention relates to an L-glutamine producing bacterium belonging to coryneform bacteria and a method for producing L-glutamine. L-Glutamine is an industrially useful amino acid as an ingredient of seasonings, liver function promoting agents, amino acid transfusions, comprehensive amino acid preparations and so forth. [0004] 2. Related Art [0005] In order to produce L-amino acids by fermentation, methods for improving microorganisms by breeding have been used abundantly. That is, since production ability of wild strains per se for L-amino acid production is extremely low in many cases, there have been known methods of imparting auxotrophy or analogue r...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0009] The inventors of the present invention assiduously studied in order to achieve the aforementioned object. As a result, they found that a strain of coryneform bacterium of which intracellular glutamine synthetase activity was enhanced showed more excellent L-glutamine producing ability and could markedly suppress the by-production of L-glutamic acid compared with strains showing the glutamine synthetase activity comparable to that of wild strains. Further, they found that production rate of L-glutamine was improved by simultaneously enhancing glutamine synthetase activity and glutamate dehydrogenase activity. Furthermore, they successfully isolated a novel gene coding for glutamine synthetase and a novel gene coding for glutamine synthetase and adenylyl transferase, and thus accomplished the present invention.

[0011] (1) A coryneform bacterium which has L-glutamine producing ability and has been modified so that its intracellular glutamine synthetase activity should be enhanced.

[0032] According to the present invention, the by-production of L-glutamic acid can be suppressed and the production efficiency of L-glutamine can be improved in the production of L-glutamine by fermentation utilizing coryneform bacteria. Further, the DNA of the present invention can be used for breeding of L-glutamine producing coryneform bacteria.

Problems solved by technology

That is, since production ability of wild strains per se for L-amino acid production is extremely low in many cases, there have been known methods of imparting auxotrophy or analogue resistance by mutation or imparting mutation for metabolic regulation and methods utilizing a combination of these.

Further, the L-glutamine fermentation also suffers from the problem of by-production of L-glutamic acid.

Although the production of L-glutamic acid can be suppressed to a certain extent by this method, there is still by-production of L-glutamic acid and the yield of L-glutamine is insufficient.

Since such improvements of L-glutamine producing bacteria as mentioned above utilize methods of treating a host bacterium with a mutagenizing agent or the like and selecting a strain showing improved productivity for L-glutamine from bacteria randomly incorporated with mutations, they require much labor and suffer from difficulties.