Antibiotic-Free Selection for Bio-Production: Moving Towards a New „Gold Standard“

Antibiotics have shown a proven efficiency profile in therapy against some infectious agents for several decades. Nevertheless, a large-scale spreading of antibiotics in the environment, and emergence of resistant or even multi-resistant pathogenic bacterial strains has become a general concern promise to even further increase. Besides therapeutic applications, antibiotics are often used as a selection pressure to avoid bio-contamination in production processes such as fermentation. In this particular context the problem can show two distinct facets: the antibiotic molecule itself, seen as a contaminant product in a given biological and the antibiotic resistance gene used as a selection marker.