Microbial Production of l -Amino Acids

Masato Ikeda, Ikeda, Masato

With the exploitation of new uses and the growing markets of amino acids, amino acid production technology has made large progress during the latter half of the 20th century. Fermentation technology has played crucial roles in this progress, and currently the fermented amino acids represent chief products of biotechnology in both volume and value. This area is highly competitive in the world market and process economics are of primary importance. For cost-effective production, many technologies have been developed to establish high-productive fermentation and recovery processes. The producer organisms used in large-scale, well-established processes have been developed to a high level of production efficiency. The tools of genetic engineering of amino acid-producing organisms have been well developed and are now being applied for enlargement of biosynthetic and transport capacity, which is beginning to have a great impact on the amino acid industry. Furthermore, the rapid strides in genome analysis are bound to revolutionize the strain improvement methodology.