Greener cephalosporin antibiotics
Researchers have developed a cheaper, more environmentally friendly bioprocess for manufacturing derivatives of cephalosporins-medically important antibiotics commonly used for treating many conditions including pneumonia, skin infections, and meningitis. Derivatives of cephalosporins currently are produced using an expensive industrial process.
Currently, every antibiotic derivatives of cephalosporin is made from a compound termed 7-aminodeacetoxycephalosporanic acid (7-ADCA). And synthesis of 7-ADCA involves a multi-step, partially synthetic method that uses toxic chemicals and is somewhat inefficient. Now, Jose Luis Barredo and colleagues have engineered a fungus called Acremonium chrysogenum to produce deacetoxycephalosporin C (DAOC), a compound that can be easily converted into 7-ADCA. Their work allows the production of cephalosporins without the use of complex chemical syntheses for the first time.
Barredo and his team accomplished this feat by first disrupting a biosynthetic gene in the fungus termed cefEF (resulting in a strain that produced large amounts of the intermediate penicillin N) and then introducing another bacterial gene cefE, which converts the intermediate penicillin N into DAOC. According to the authors, work is ongoing to optimize the strain of fungus for use in large fermentors and to increase the yields of DAOC and 7-ADCA for industrial production of cephalosporins.
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