Bio-Chemical Production Processes of Bioactive Natural Products

A special issue of Processes (ISSN 2227-9717). This special issue belongs to the section "Biological Processes and Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2022) | Viewed by 3232

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Z. Noskowskiego str. 12/14,61-704 Poznań, Poland
Interests: Bio-chemical production of bioactive fungal natural products. Particularly development of a novel method, so-called chemical programming of fungi to produce new bioactive molecules. Bioactive and intelligent molecules such as modified microbial natural products to test their bioactivities and fluorescent molecular probes to study and control biological systems (especially cancer cells).

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, one of the greatest global challenges is development of new anticancer and antimicrobial drugs, especially due to an increasing phenomena of multidrug resistance organisms, newly emerged pathogens and increasing number of cancer related diseases. SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is an example of how important the development of new antimicrobial drugs is.

Natural products are a rich source of new drugs as they constitute more than two-thirds of clinically used antibiotics and 50% of anticancer drugs. However, in most cases genuine natural products cannot be used directly as medicines due to toxic side effects or suboptimal pharmacokinetics. In order to improve the pharmacological properties of these compounds, including bioactivity and stability, or to produce better precursors of semi-synthetic pathways, unnatural derivatives should be made, for example from natural products of fungal or bacterial origin.

Concerning synthetic biology in the natural product bio-production, much has been done using a model organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, because of its great toolkit in genomic manipulation. However, because of some limitations with S. cerevisiae system for instance with toxicity of the newly engineered and produced metabolites or time-consuming protocols, new approaches are required.

Biotransformation is a process by which organic compounds are transformed from one form to another, aided by organisms such as bacteria or fungi and by their enzymes. Side reactions lead to unwanted products and the treatment of the (desired) product can be complex and involve multi-step procedures such as biomass removal or extraction of the culture fluid. Extraction of biotransformation products is undoubtedly an ambitious task, although scaling-up the production and using the state-of-the-art techniques such as high performance liquid chromatography combined with high resolution mass spectrometry, can enable this task.

This special issue on “Processes of Bio-Chemical Production of Bioactive Natural Products” aims to review novel advances in the development of new methods of bio-chemical production of bioactive natural products and their analogues. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Synthetic biology tools in bio-production of natural products derivatives
  • Chemical synthesis and semi-synthesis of natural products
  • Modifications by biotransformation
  • Alternative methods for bio-chemical production of natural products
  • Processes / mechanisms of bio-chemical production
Dr. Dorota Jakubczyk
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Bioactive natural products 
  • Synthetic biology 
  • Biotransformation 
  • Semi-synthesis 
  • Bio-chemical production 
  • Processes

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 2385 KiB  
Article
Assessing the Environmental and Economic Sustainability of Functional Food Ingredient Production Process
by Anushree Priyadarshini, Brijesh K. Tiwari and Gaurav Rajauria
Processes 2022, 10(3), 445; https://doi.org/10.3390/pr10030445 - 23 Feb 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2778
Abstract
Development and application of novel technologies in food processing is vital for ensuring the availability of adequate, safe, and convenient food with the desired quality and functional properties. Environmental and economic sustainability of technologies is essential prior to their application in the food [...] Read more.
Development and application of novel technologies in food processing is vital for ensuring the availability of adequate, safe, and convenient food with the desired quality and functional properties. Environmental and economic sustainability of technologies is essential prior to their application in the food processing sector. The objective of this research is to determine the environmental and economic feasibility of ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) for recovering functional food ingredients from seaweed. Experimental data is used to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA) to investigate the environmental performance with a functional unit (FU) of obtaining 1 g of extracted polyphenols, measured as gallic acid equivalents (mg GAE)/g seaweed. A life cycle impact assessment is performed with ReCiPe 2016 at midpoint. The cost of manufacturing (COM) of phenolic-rich extracts (as functional ingredient, bioactive, or nutraceutical) is estimated using time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC). The environmental profile findings show that across all categories, the UAE has considerably lower impacts than the conventional method, with electricity as the most important impact contributor, followed by solvent production. An economic assessment estimates the COM over a one-year period at a large scale using the UAE to be EUR 1,200,304, EUR 2,368,440, and EUR 4,623,290 for extraction vessel capacities of 0.05, 0.1, and 0.15 m3, respectively. Raw materials (including the type of raw material) and operational labour costs are the primary contributors to the COM. The findings thus present evidence to support the adoption of an environmentally and economically viable technology for functional ingredient production. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Bio-Chemical Production Processes of Bioactive Natural Products)
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