Influence of Carbon and Nitrogen Sources on the Growth and Sporulation of Bacillus thuringiensis var Galleriae for Biopesticide Production

R. K. I. Anderson and K. Jayaraman

Abstract
The influence of glucose and yeast extract (YE) as carbon and nitrogen sources, respectively, on the metabolic processes involving growth, insecticidal protein synthesis and sporulation were studied in batch bioreactor. Significant changes in the metabolic process were observed with different concentration level of glucose and YE. Higher concentration of glucose has resulted in heterogenous population of cells and higher concentration of YE has resulted in the delay of spore release. This detailed study on the influence of the substrate level towards metabolic flux could provide a way for the enhancement of sporulation and insecticidal crystal proteins (ICP). Culture growth as a macroscopic phenomenon was observed to be influenced by varying level of substrates for optimum metabolic flux for the growth and subsequent sporulation with ICP synthesis. Furthermore, need for optimum initial concentration of glucose and YE for the balanced flux of substrates, was realized.

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Keywords
Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. galleriae, biopesticide, insecticidal crystal protein, metabolic flux, sporulation