earticle

영어

α-ketoglutarate is a kind of ketone derivatives of glutaric acid, an intermediate of Krebs cycle and therefore the function of this chemical is biologically very important in metabolism. It is known that the functions of α-ketoglutarate are various such as prevention of nitrogen accumulation in the body, medicine to cure malnutrition, control lipid level in serum, and delay wrinkle formation. α-ketoglutarate can be synthesized by deamination of cheap L-glutamate by glutamate dehydrogenase. The glutamate dehydrogenase is cofactor-dependent enzyme and therefore it is needed to continuous addition of cofactor for the synthesis. The introduction of regeneration method for the cofactor regeneration is necessary due to high cost of the cofactor. In order to recycling cofactor, electrochemical method was used in this study. Continuous type of electrochemical bioreactor was designed for the continuous α-ketoglutarate production. For this setup, NAD+-dependent glutamate dehydrogenase from recombinant E.coli which contains thermophilic glutamate dehydrogenase from Thermus sp. was purified. NAD+ was modified with polyethylene glycol (PEG) to retain cofactor in the continuous electrochemical bioreactor. Details will be presented and discussed.