Surveying Desferal production increment by inducing mutation in Streptomyces griseoflavus

Desferal or Desferrioxamine B mesylate is an iron chealator drug. This medicine decreases the iron overload in the thalassemia patients who have been blood transfused the excess of iron is excreted through bile or urine. Novartis is the sole company which produces desferrioxamine B mesylate in the world and our country is importer of such drug. Thus we tried to increase Desferal production by inducing mutation in Streptomyces griseoflavus. This is an applied research carried out at pilot level. The organism is a Gram-positive bacterium that was supplied in lyophilized by Persian Type culture Collection, Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST), Tehran, Iran bearing the code no. PTCC1130, which was cultured on Des4 medium. The organism was mutated by UV irradiation hence selective techniques and markers were employed to distinguish marked strains from parent S. griseoflavus. When the mutated organisms were selected according to their characteristics and used to fuse their protoplasts in order to obtain high yield desferrioxamine producing recombinant Streptomyces griseoflavus. The varied parameters were bacterial growth rate and desferal concentration in the culture broth. Our study showed that the rate of desferal production in mutant's strains called C7031 and S7011 and fusants srains called FP10 and FP9 was higher than wiled type Streptomyces griseoflavus. The increment in production of desferrioxamine was found to be 68% in FP9 and 81% in FP10 fusants. The mutation and protoplasts fusion of Streptomyces griseoflavus caused increment in production of desferrioxamine. The infrared spectrum, thin layer chromatogram of desferrioxamine extracted from culture broth was similar to that of standard desferrioxamine (Novartis) from the point of molecular identity.