Design of a fungal biofilm reactor for recombinant protein production from Aspergillus oryzae

Fungi are microorganisms exhibiting high secretive power of various metabolites and have the ability to perform post-translational modifications during protein synthesis. In the field of fermentation industry, they are ideal hosts for secondary metabolites and recombinant protein production. At the industrial-scale, equipments usually required for solid-state or submerged fermentation of filamentous fungi have demonstrated their limitations in terms of productivity, mass transfers or products recovery (1, 2). Recently, fungal biofilm reactors were designed to combine advantages from submerged and solid-state culture and reveal their usefulness for greater secondary metabolites production relative to submerged culture conditions (3).
In our work, we propose the design of a fungal biofilm reactor for a recombinant protein production from an Aspergillus oryzae strain containing a GFP reporter gene system under the control of a promoter specifically induced in solid-state conditions. The fungal biofilm reactor is composed of a metal structured packing, having the function of inert support for biofilm growth, immerged or aspersed by a liquid medium.
Whereas recombinant protein production is not significantly different at the flask-scale between submerged and biofilm conditions, productivity is higher in the submerged conditions at the bioreactor-scale. Presence of recombinant proteins entrapped in the biofilm matrix highlights a diffusion constraint and a lower mass transfer in our fungal biofilm reactor. However, persistence of a free liquid biomass of low viscosity and fungal biomass retention on the support are attractive for the implementation of a continuous process in our fungal biofilm reactor. Further studies will consider a 2-D proteomic comparison of the extracellular medium from fungal biofilm reactor and submerged culture conditions in order to better understand proteins secretion and identify over-expressed proteins in biofilm conditions.