Screening of a L-Lactic Acid Producing Strain of Lactobacillus Casei by Low-Energy Ion Implantation

Low-energy ion implantation is a new mutation source, which has the characteristic of light damage, high mutation rate, and a broad spectrum mutation. In order to obtain industrial strain with high L-(+)-lactic acid yield, the original strain Lactobacillus casei CICC6028 was mutated by nitrogen ion beam implantation. It was found that the original strain had a higher positive mutation rate when the output power was 10keV and the dose of N+ implantation was 50×2.6×1013 ions/cm2. The mutant N-2 was obtained for many times screening and its yield of L-(+)-lactic acid was 136 g/L which was improved by 38.8% compared with the original strain whose yield of L-(+)-lactic acid was 98g/L as the cultivation time was 120h. The initial screening methods were also studied in this work but it was found that the transparent halos method was unavailable, so the initial screening was performed by shake flask fermentation. HPLC chromatogram was used to analyse the purity of L-(+)-lactic acid that was produced by the mutant strain N-2, and the result indicated the main production of N-2 was L-(+)-lactic acid and there was no other acid almost.