The word strain improvement is the essential parts of any commercial fermentation process you can think of. Lower fermentation manufacturing cost can be link with fermenters engineering design, even improvement of our microbial strains give a good opportunity for cost reduction in the industries today.
Improve strains can be gotten by inducing genetic variations in the natural strain and even other screening. Nowadays great ways are being put to developed industrial strains that have the effort to produce the compound of interest at a great and faster rate. It can make the ability of a manufacturing steps to meet additional demands without you adding more fermenters.
To improve industrial strains is clearly when one takes into considerations the additional anticipated capacity and extra fermenters (capital cost) needed to meet the throughput in the absence of titer gains and strains developments efforts.
Definition of Strain
A strain is a part of the industrial microbiology which deals with genetic variants of a microorganism example are virus, fungus and even bacterium. Genetic variants means change or alteration in the DNA sequence of organisms otherwise called mutation.
What is Strain Improvement?
This is defined as the process of improving the productions and yielding capacity of a microorganism with the use of a certain technological, microbiological, and biochemical process. Microorganisms used for strain improvement must have certain qualities which will determine their usage for industrial process.
When the microorganism of interest are being isolated from their natural habitat, it is tested and certified fit for the process of strain improvement.
For the organisms to be more industrial important, the isolated organisms must pass through deliberate technological manipulations aimed at improving the microorganisms efficiency and productivity in the industrial process.
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What are the Characteristics of this Strain Improvement
This are a few of the characteristics of strain improvements
1. Genetic improvement
2. Rapid Growth
3. Non-toxicity to human
4. It uses cheaper materials
5. It improve the use of carbon and nitrogen sources.
6. Removing of the production of compounds that may interfere with downstream processing
Purpose of Strain Improvement
1. To increase productivity
2. It increase the permeability
3. It change un-used co-metabolites
4. It regulates the activities of enzymes
5. It helps in genetic engineering
Method of Strain Improvement
The methods of strain improvement are mutant selection, recombination, growth selection, hybridization and genetic engineering.
1. Mutant Selection:
The term mutation is the change in the organisms traits, for mutagens to induced mutation the process is called mutagenesis. The agents that induced mutations is called mutagens.
Spontaneous mutation is when mutagenesis occur without any special treatments, while mutation that occur due to a treatment with other certain agent is called induced mutation.
2. Recombination:
Recombination is used to generate new products based on cross over, transformation, conjugation, transduction, protoplast fusions i.e the non producing strains of two species being fused together (streptomyces griseus and streptomyces tenjimariensis).
3. Growth selection:
This is another method which the best growing cells are selected for the process of regeneration. It can be done by selecting the fastest growing or largest cells. It can also be done by selecting high yielding cells
4. Hybridisation:
It is the process of mating two different strains to create a new single strain. This can happen naturally or artificially.
The advantage of hybridization is that it can produce very hardy strains with many desirable qualities. However, it can also be unpredictable. It is not always possible to predict the outcome of a hybrid between two strains.
5. Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering is a method by which genes from one organism are introduced into another. This can happen naturally or artificially.
The advantage of genetic engineering is that it allows you to select the specific genes that you want to clone. You can also insert genes from other organisms with desired qualities. This can result in very hardy strains with many desirable qualities.
However, genetic engineering is also a risky process. There is always the possibility of introducing new genes that could have a negative effect on the cell.
Applications of Strain Improvements
Strain improvement is useful medically, industrially and otherwise. Medically it is used to produced chemical called insulin. It is also used to treat genetic disease like SCID by rDNA technology. In microbiology, it is used to improve the microbial productivity and characteristics. Strain improvement is also used in large scale productions of Vaccines, Enzymes, Blood clotting factors and Interferon’s growth factors.
Conclusion
Strain enhancement or improvement is the enhancement of the characteristics of a particular cannabis strain. This can be done by selective breeding or genetic modification. The goal of line propagation is to produce a plant with desirable qualities such as high THC content, large shoots, and rapid flowering. Breeders use a variety of methods to improve strains, including back-crossing, and crossbreeding.