Corynebacterium glutamicum

Technical Data

Type of microorganism	Bacterium
Microorganism name	Corynebacterium glutamicum
Average yield in organism	Only one study found for production of food related proteins that reported a yield: 0.783 g/L
General temperature range	30°C (average value from studies cited before)
General pH range	pH 7-8.5 (Follmann et al., 2009)
Growth rate (µ)	Maximal growth rate on minimal medium of 0.62/hour. In industrial conditions: lower growth rate of 0.4-0.45/hour (Haas et al., 2019)
Ease of genetic modification	A lot of genetic tools available, however CRISPR-Cas9 is toxic in C. glutamicum (S. M. Lee & Jeong, 2022)
Feedstock case studies (suitable substrates)	Corn straw hydrolysate, casasava bagasse, rice straw, wheat bran (B. Zhang et al., 2020) Textile waste (Bello et al., 2025)
Downstream purification processing complexity (isloation, lysis, purification) *	Possibilty of extracellular production, reducing DSP complexity (X. Liu et al., 2016)
Advantages	Does not produce endotoxins (M. J. Lee & Kim, 2018) Low protease activity in its secretome (M. J. Lee & Kim, 2018)
Challenges (Key limitations, risk factors)	Has not really been used for the production of food proteins yet, so no knowledge whether production is feasible on industrial scale. Post-translational modifications are different from eukaryotes, which can alter the protein structure. (Eastham & Leman, 2024)
Extra/remark	C. glutamicum is mostly used for the production of amino acids (L-glutmate, MSG, L-lysine) as additives in feed and food (Lee & Kim, 2018)

Alpha-amylase (Yim et al., 2016)

Leghemoglobin (Wang et al., 2023)