Bacillus subtilis

Technical Data

Type of microorganism	Bacterium
Microorganism name	Bacillus subtilis
Average yield in organism	9 180 U/mL (calculated based on activities in Vojnovic et al., (2024) in combination with the values from the study cited before ** Only one study found for production of food related proteins, yield was 0,0569 g/L
General temperature range	37°C (average value from studies cited before)
General pH range	pH 6.5-7 (average values from studies cited before)
Growth rate (µ)	WT strain has growth rate of 0.49/hour, engineered fast-growing strain has growth rate of 0.75/hour (Liu et al., 2020)
Ease of genetic modification	A lot of simple and efficient genetic manipulation tools present (Su et al., 2020)
Feedstock case studies (suitable substrates)	Ram horn hydrolysate, soya bean hull (Bajić et al., 2022) Corn steep liquor, potato starch wastewater, palm kernel cake, watermelon waste (Rasool et al., 2023)
Downstream purification processing complexity (isloation, lysis, purification) *	Efficient protein secretion simplifies DSP (Su et al., 2020)
Advantages	Does not produce endotoxins (Neef et al., 2021) Only has one cell membrane (G+ bacterium), which facilitates secretion. On top of that, it has very efifcient secretion pathways. (Su et al., 2020)
Challenges (Key limitations, risk factors)	Secretes a lot of proteases that can degrade the recombinant protein (Neef et al., 2021) Post-translational modifications are different from eukaryotes, which can alter the protein structure. (Eastham & Leman, 2024)
Extra/remark	Enzymes produced by B. subtilis are mainly proteases, lipases & other non-food related enzymes (Vojnovic et al., 2024)

Alpha-casein (Biermann et al., 2025)

Beta-galactosidase (Chen et al., 2008)

Alpha-amylase (K. Zhang et al., 2024)