A glutamic acid-producing bacillus.

During ail examination of microbial culture filtrates capable of reversing the inhibition of Streptomyces aureofaciens Strain NRRL B-1286 caused by the metliionine analogue norleucine, one filtrate was found to possess striking reversing potency. Analysis showed this could not be due to methionine. The reversal properties of the filtrate were traced to glutamic acid which imparted high reversing activity to the filtrate by virtue of its unexpectedly high concentration. This paper deals with the study of a sporeforming bacillus which is capable of synthesizing extraordinary amounts of glutamic acid as the chief product of metabolism. Synthesis of an individual amino acid by microorganisms was virtually unknown until the polyglutamyl peptides of Bacillus anthracis and Bacillus subtilis, consisting of Dand iisomers of glutamic acid, were isolated (Ivanovics and Bruckner, 1937; Thorne, 1956). Distinctive accumulation of free amino acids first centered around the synthesis of a-e-diaminopimelic acid by a mutant of Escherichia coli (Davis, 1952) and its adaptation to the commercial production of ilysine by enzymatic decarboxylalation (Beesch and Tanner, 1958; Casida, 1956). The fermentative production of high yields of a-ketoglutaric acid from hexoses (Lockwood and Stodola, 1946; Asai et al., 1955) led to an efficient microbial conversion to iglutamate (0tsuka et al., 1957; Katagiri et al., 1957; Smythe and Huang, 1956; Chas. Pfizer and Company, Inc., 1957). Later, a number of instances of direct fermentative production of iglutamate from sugars were reported (Asai et al., 1957; Kinoshita et al., 1957a; Kita, 1957). The extensive survey by Kinoshita et al. (1957a) showed that about one fifth of the 650 bacterial cultures tested, one third of the 372 streptomycetes, one third of the 468 yeasts, and one tenth of the