The study of possibility of biologically active agents sorption from culture liquid on the example of coproporphyrin III

At release of biologically active agents received by means of microbiological synthesis one of the first stages is filtration of culture liquid with native solution receiving. This stage is especially labor-consuming if a producer of target substance is the bacterial cell with the size about 1 micron as insoluble residues of nutrient medium and metabolites of a producer and also cells clog the filtering surface, thereby increasing hydrodynamic drag force so that filtration practically stops. Various expensive methods, for example, regular updating of a filter blanket by mechanical removal of the top part of a filter blanket together with solid fraction of culture liquid are used to overcome this problem. Such method is applied on drum filters. Drum filters are of large size, take a lot of place at the plant and are expensive producing and operating. The present article considers the possibility of filtration stage replacement with more technological process of sorption of a main product immediately from cultural liquid, using the example of coproporphyrin III a producer of which is Arthrobacter globiformis bacterium with cell sizes of about 1 micron. The technology of coproporphyrin III extracting and its purification with coproporphyrin III sorption immediately from culture liquid without biomass separation in pulsed fluidized mode with the subsequent desorption was developed. Further stages of extracting and purification include settling of target substance by means of the solution рН value change, porphyrine extraction from the precipitation, chromatographic purification on a molecular sorbent, the transfering of coproporphyrin III to potassium salt and drying. The technology was tested in vitro and the coproporphyrin III with high degree of cleaning was obtained.