• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.73-78
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• 1992

- Enzymatic synthesis of L-tryptophan(Trp) using E. coli tryptophanase has been investigated. In order to reduce the substrate inhibition by indole and to increase the product yield of L-tryptophan three different approaches have been made in this work. First, indole was intermittently fed to the reaction mixture in order to control the indole concentration at lower level. When 15 mM of indole was used as a total amount of substrate, conversion yield of 80% has been obtained with intermittent feeding while only 20% of indole was converted into L-tryptophan by conventional batch operation, The second method employed in this work was the use of cyclohexane-phosphate buffer organic two-phase system. In this system, indole was mainly partitioned into the organic-solvent phase and therefore substrate inhibition was expected to be reduced. L-Tryptophan production in organic two-phase system was, however, unexpectedly lower than that obtained in aqueous buffer solution. As a third method cyclodextrins have been added to the aqueous reaction mixture. It was found that the addition of $\beta$-cyclodextrin enhanced the tryptophan synthesis noticeably while $\alpha$-cycfodextrin showed little effect on tryptophan production.