Calculation of the oxygen required for cell production.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R I Mateles.
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Resting cells of Aspergillus parasiticus ATCC 15517 were used to prepare highly labeled aflatoxins from labeled acetate. High synthetic activity in growing cells was evidenced only during 40 to 70 hr of incubation. Glucose was required for high incorporation efficiency, whereas the concentration of the labeled acetate determined the specific activity of the product. When labeled acetate was continuously added to maintain a concentration near but not exceeding 10 mm, in a culture containing 30 g of glucose per liter, 2% of its labels could be recovered in the purified aflatoxins which have a specific activity more than three times that of the labeled acetate.
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The chemostat culture technique was used to study the control mechanisms which operate during utilization of mixtures of glucose and lactose and glucose and l-aspartic acid by populations of Escherichia coli B6. Constitutive mutants were rapidly selected during continuous culture on a mixture of glucose and lactose, and the beta-galactosidase level of the culture increased greatly. After mutant selection, the specific beta-galactosidase level of the culture was a decreasing function of growth rate. In cultures of both the inducible wild type and the constitutive mutant, glucose and lactose were simultaneously utilized at moderate growth rates, whereas only glucose was used in the inducible cultures at high growth rates. Catabolite repression was shown to be the primary mechanism of control of beta-galactosidase level and lactose utilization in continuous culture on mixed substrates. In batch culture, as in the chemostat, catabolite repression acting by itself on the lac enzymes was insufficient to prevent lactose utilization or cause diauxie. Interference with induction of the lac operon, as well as catabolite repression, was necessary to produce diauxic growth. Continuous cultures fed mixtures of glucose and l-aspartic acid utilized both substrates at moderate growth rates, even though the catabolic enzyme aspartase was linearly repressed with increasing growth rate. Although the repression of aspartase paralleled the catabolite repression of beta-galactosidase, l-aspartic acid could be utilized even at very low levels of the catabolic enzyme because of direct anabolic incorporation into protein.
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Continuous culture on mixed glucose-lactose or glucose-butyrate media inoculated with river water led to a population composed of a pseudomonad and a coliform. The glucose was used preferentially to the other carbon source, and the utilization of the secondary carbon source was greatly reduced at high growth rates. Significant amounts of acetate were excreted even though the cultures were limited by the carbon source, rather than by oxygen or other nutrients. At high growth rates, the pseudomonad dominated the population, whereas at low and moderate growth rates the coliform was dominant. A syntrophic relationship was shown by the fact that the pseudomonad could not grow alone on the glucose-butyrate medium.
A method based on tritium suicide was developed to enrich auxotrophic mutants of Aspergillus flavus. N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine (NG) was chosen as a mutagen, since a wide variety of mutations were induced by the action of 0.1% NG on A. flavus conidia suspended in phosphate buffer (pH 7.0). The decimal reduction time under these conditions was about 30 min, and the surviving population contained 4 to 6% auxotrophs after 1 hr of mutagenesis. This proportion was then increased by tritium suicide of wild-type cells. At a concentration of 1.3 mum, (3)H-leucine was incorporated better than (3)H-proline or (3)H-thymidine into the germinating conidia. With about 20 hr of incubation and a short treatment in a high-speed mixer to disentangle mycelia and conidia, a 5- to 20-fold decrease in the number of survivors resulted from the incorporated (3)H-leucine (5 c/mmole) after 1 week of storage at 5 C. At a 10-fold lower concentration, the uptake of radioactivity and the subsequent suicide rate were much lower. With (3)H-leucine, the proportion of auxotrophs in the surviving population rose from 5 to about 20% during 2 weeks of storage at 5 C. Mutants requiring various intermediates for protein or nucleic acid synthesis or requiring vitamins were isolated. Finally, it was noted that A. flavus shows a much higher resistance to tritium suicide than does Escherichia coli.
A species of the genus Bacillus, capable of growth on normal alkanes at 70 degrees C, was isolated by the method known as enrichment culture. Preliminary analyses of its amino acid composition indicate that it would be a good source of protein for human nutrition. Possible advantages of the use of such organisms for the production of single-cell protein include simplification of fermentor cooling and asepsis.
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Lim, P. G. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge), and R. I. Mateles. Tryptophan- and indole-excreting prototrophic mutant of Escherichia coli. J. Bacteriol. 87:1051-1055. 1964.-A mutant of Escherichia coli K-12, capable of excreting 350 mg of indole and 50 mg of tryptophan per liter when grown on minimal medium, was found to have a level of 3-deoxy-d-arabino-heptulosonic acid-7-phosphate (DAHP) synthetase 60% higher than the parent, and to have a 10- to 15-fold elevation of the levels of enzymes in the tryptophan branch of the pathway for aromatic amino acid biosynthesis. Contrary to what previous investigators found in E. coli W, the presence of a tyrosine-repressible component of DAHP synthetase sensitive to end-product inhibition by tyrosine could not be demonstrated in either strain K-12 or the mutant. The mutant strain is an example of a microorganism which excretes biosynthetic end products solely because of genetic derepression, as opposed to most previously reported amino acid accumulators which require a combination of genetic and physiological manipulation to achieve derepression.