Journal
APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
Volume 103, Issue 1, Pages 1-8Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00253-018-9435-1
Keywords
Methanotroph; Isolation techniques; Extinction culturing; Soil substrate membrane system; Chemostat screening
Categories
Funding
- National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) [2015M3D3A1A01064881, 2016K2A9A2A06004870]
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [HO6234/1-1]
- Leibniz Universitat Hannover
- National Research Foundation of Korea [2015M3D3A1A01064881] Funding Source: Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information (KISTI), National Science & Technology Information Service (NTIS)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The recent drop in the price of natural gas has rekindled the interests in methanotrophs, the organisms capable of utilizing methane as the sole electron donor and carbon source, as biocatalysts for various industrial applications. As heterologous expression of the methane monooxygenases in more amenable hosts has been proven to be nearly impossible, future success in methanotroph biotechnology largely depends on securing phylogenetically and phenotypically diverse methanotrophs with relatively high growth rates. For long, isolation of methanotrophs have relied on repeated single colony picking after initial batch enrichment with methane, which is a very rigorous and time-consuming process. In this review, three unconventional isolation methods devised for facilitation of the isolation process, diversification of targeted methanotrophs, and/or screening of rapid growers are summarized. The soil substrate membrane method allowed for isolation of previously elusive methanotrophs and application of high-throughput extinction plating technique facilitated the isolation procedure. Use of a chemostat with gradually increased dilution rates proved effective in screening for the fastest-growing methanotrophs from environmental samples. Development of new isolation technologies incorporating microfluidics and single-cell techniques may lead to discovery of previously unculturable methanotrophs with unexpected metabolic potentials and thus, certainly warrant future investigation.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available