Fermentations in 50 L bioreactors were conducted according to the methods described earlier [17] (
link). In brief, the seed culture contained 200 mL of seed culture in yeast extract–peptone–dextrose (YPD) media. The fermentation culture contained 10 g yeast extract, 20 g peptone, 40 g glycerol, 4 × 10
–3 g biotin, 4.47 g Na
2HPO
4, 8.22 g NaH
2PO
4, and 13.4 g yeast nitrogen base (YNB) per liter of culture medium. The fermentations were carried out using the following conditions: The pH was controlled to 6.4 with NH
4OH and the temperature was set at 25 °C. After a 10 min starvation phase, the methanol feed (100% methanol with 12 mL·L
–1Pichia trace minerals (PTM1) salts) was initiated. Methanol induction was continued for 45–50 h.
The fermentation supernatant was recovered by centrifugation at 8000 revolutions per minute (rpm) for 25 min and then collected for RBD purification. The samples were sequentially subjected to a multimodal weak cation exchange (
Capto MMC; GE Healthcare, USA), hydrophobic chromatography (Phenyl Sepharose High Performance; GE Healthcare, USA), strong anion exchange (
Source 30Q; GE Healthcare, USA), strong cation exchange (
Source 30S; GE Healthcare, USA), and size-exclusion chromatography (SEC;
Superdex-200; GE Healthcare, USA) to finally obtain high-purity RBD protein.
Liu B., Yin Y., Liu Y., Wang T., Sun P., Ou Y., Gong X., Hou X., Zhang J., Ren H., Luo S., Ke Q., Yao Y., Xu J, & Wu J. (2021). A Vaccine Based on the Receptor-Binding Domain of the Spike Protein Expressed in Glycoengineered Pichia pastoris Targeting SARS-CoV-2 Stimulates Neutralizing and Protective Antibody Responses. Engineering (Beijing, China), 13, 107-115.