Successful Development of a New Enzyme using Pichia Pastoris

Biocatalysts were approached by a customer requiring a bespoke lipase to achieve the highly specific activities required for the innovative modification of specific fats and oils.

Biocatalysts has developed significant expertise in developing and manufacturing enzymes using a range of hosts. This is an area that we continue to develop in order to ensure that our customers benefit from using the most cost effective and appropriate host for their specific enzyme application. In this project we used our expertise in Pichia pastoris to develop an effective basis for manufacture.

P.pastoris is one of Biocatalysts’ main expression systems for enzyme manufacture, in particular for enzymes to be used in the food industry. P.pastoris holds QPS (Qualified Presumption of Safety) status, which means it has undergone a safety assessment performed by the European Food Safety Authority and deemed safe for the production of food industry enzymes. In addition to this P.pastoris is effective at secreting over-expressed proteins at high yields whilst secreting a low volume of endogenous proteins and no endotoxins, leading to an enzyme product intrinsically ‘cleaner’ and less contaminated with unwanted proteins. As a yeast, P.pastoris also has the capability to produce more complex proteins than bacterial expression systems using their cellular machinery to perform complex protein folding and post-translational modifications.

Biocatalysts met the customers brief by identifying enzyme candidates for their process and assessing them against a suitable substrate. Once application trials proved positive and the best performing enzyme was chosen, the production was scaled up (applying “Design for Manufacture” principles) from small scale fermentation to large scale commercial production. Not only did the enzyme meet the precise specificity requirements, it has also been identified to be potentially useful in other non-food applications.