High‐level production of microbial prodigiosin: A review

Abstract

Prodigiosin is a natural red pigment derived primarily from secondary metabolites of microorganisms, especially Serratia marcescens. It can also be chemically synthesized. Prodigiosin has been proven to have antitumor, antibacterial, antimalaria, anti‐insect, antialgae, and immunosuppressive activities, and is gaining increasing important in the global market because of its great potential application value in clinical medicine development, environmental treatment, preparation of food additives, and so on. Due to the low efficiency of prodigiosin chemical synthesis, high‐level prodigiosin of production by microorganisms are necessary for prodigiosin applications. In this paper, the production of prodigiosin by microorganism in recent decades is reviewed. The methods and strategies for increasing the yield of prodigiosin are discussed from the aspects of medium composition, additives, factors affecting production conditions, strain modification, and fermentation methods.

Synthesis, Anticancer Potential and Comprehensive Toxicity Studies of Novel Brominated Derivatives of Bacterial Biopigment Prodigiosin from Serratia marcescens ATCC 27117

“…Interestingly, extending the cultivation time to 48 h resulted Molecules 2022, 27, 3729 4 of 18 in a slightly higher biopigment production only in FB medium (11.1 mg/L), which has the highest peptone content, while in other media a decrease in the biopigment concentration was noticed. Previously, peptone and yeast extract were found to be the best carbon and nitrogen sources for S. marcescens to produce PG [46], while other studies showed that glycerol plays an important role as a carbon source [47]. Beyond 48 h, prolonged cultivation time resulted in an overall PG decrease in each medium, due to the depletion of nutrients and possible degradation of PG.…”

“…This yield was almost 2-fold lower than that achieved in flasks (Figure 3) but leaves room for further optimization. Indeed, usually fed-batch fermentation was found to be optimal for PG as well as some other biopigments production [10,46,52]. For example, by optimizing culture medium using brown sugar or cassava wastewater as low-cost carbon sources in a 5 L agitator bioreactor, yields of 8.1 g/L and 6.1 g/L were achieved, respectively [49,53].…”

Optimized prodigiosin production with Pseudomonas putida KT2440 using parallelized noninvasive online monitoring

“…7,36,[46][47][48][49] It has been shown by You et al 46 that the pigC enzyme has its temperature optimum between 10 and 20 C. Other prodigiosin-producing strains such as S. marcescens have been reported to show still higher prodigiosin titers (more than 6 g/L), yet at the drawback of using an opportunistic pathogenic strain. 4 In addition to optimization of cultivation conditions, further genetic modification of P. putida strains has been shown to increase prodigiosin titers. 50 Subsequently, the space-time yield (STY) was calculated for this production process to evaluate the productivity of the process.…”

“…The bright red‐colored natural product prodigiosin is a prominent member of the prodiginine class and is produced by various bacteria, including Serratia marcescens ( S. marcescens ) and Hahella chejuensis ( H. chejuensis ) 1–4 . Prodiginines exhibit various biological activities as antibiotic and antimalarial compounds, anti‐cancer compounds, autophagy modulating compounds, and compounds against plant pathogenic nematodes and fungi 5–12 .…”

“…Optimization of cultivation parameters has resulted in titers of up to 94 mg/L prodigiosin in the fermentation broth. The optimization of prodigiosin production is of high scientific interest, which is reflected in the large number of studies on improved cultivation conditions 4 . However, systematic investigations of the cultivation conditions using online measurement techniques have the potential to enable the production of larger amounts of the bioactive natural product prodigiosin.…”