Escherichia coli

Technical Data

Type of microorganism	Bacterium
Microorganism name	Escherichia coli
Average yield in organism	22 000 - 25 000 U/L (average activity from studies cited before) ** 7-10 g/L (avereage values form studies cited before)
General temperature range	34-42°C (average values from studies cited before)
General pH range	pH 6.5-7.5 (average values from studies cited before)
Growth rate (µ)	0.46/hour (Bauer & Shiloach, 1974) 0.7/hour (Urniezius et al., 2023)
Ease of genetic modification	Very easy genetic modification, well characterized genetics (Augustin et al., 2023)
Feedstock case studies (suitable substrates)	Ram horn hydrolysate (Bajić et al., 2022) Lignocellulose, molasses, and glycerol (Förster & Gescher, 2014)
Downstream purification processing complexity (isloation, lysis, purification) *	Lack of eukaryotic PTMs, can lead to the need of chemical modification after purification (Gomes et al., 2018) Cannot secrete proteins outside the periplasm, which leads to extra processing (cell lysis & more purification) (Spohner et al., 2015) Production of intracellular inclusion bodies can difficult downstream processing (Eastham & Leman, 2024)
Advantages	Rapid growth, high levels of production, very easy to genetically modify (Augustin et al., 2023)
Challenges (Key limitations, risk factors)	Not suiitable for expression of proteins containing disulphide bridges (Spohner et al., 2015) Post-translational modoifications are different from eukaryotes, which can alter the protein structure. Can also produce endotoxins, which can challenge food-grade production. (Eastham & Leman, 2024)
Extra/remark

Alpha-casein (Y. Wang et al., 2020)

Beta-galactosidase (Gennari et al., 2023)

Chymosin B (Menzella et al., 2003)

Truffle sweet protein (Nadal et al., 2021)

Alpha-amylase (Zafar et al., 2019)

Human Collagen I (Xie et al., 2023)

Human unhydroxylated collagen II (Guo et al., 2010)