Production and separation of formate dehydrogenase from Candida boidinii

The production of FDH in a 40-l bioreactor was carried out with methanol as the inducer to reach the final intracellular FDH activity of 35 U/g cell. Among different permeabilization methods studied, treatment with toluene at a relatively small amount resulted in the cells with the highest FDH activity. Crude FDH cell extract obtained by ultrasonically breaking down the cell wall was treated with polyethyleneimine (PEI) to separate FDH from other proteins. By adding PEI at a low concentration of 0.04 mg/ml to the cell extract, ∼50% of the proteins formed aggregates with PEI and precipitated; however, FDH was not in these aggregates and remained in the solution. After the PEI treatment, the specific FDH activity increased by 1.6-fold. SDS-PAGE analysis showed that PEI precipitation removed some impurity protein molecules that cannot be separated by affinity chromatography with Sepharose-Procion Blue HERB as the separation ligand, and thus improved the separation efficiency. The adsorbed FDH in the affinity column was eluted with KCl solution. Adding 5 mM NAD+ in 0.2 M KCl improved the FDH elution and increased the specific FDH activity by 1.38-fold as compared to elution with 1 M KCl. Overall, the PEI precipitation and dye affinity chromatographic process obtained a high recovery yield of 56% with a 5.5-fold increase in the specific FDH activity from the crude cell extract.