Recently, the Food Microbial Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory of Jiangnan University, with the support of the "863" project, has made progress in the production of acetoin (3-hydroxy-2-butanone) by fermentation of microorganisms.

The university’s scientific researchers adopted a high-throughput screening strategy to obtain a strain of FMME044 from the soil. Under the optimal medium conditions, the yield of acetoin was 48.6 g/L. Based on the analysis of the physiological characteristics of the strain, the researchers put forward an effective fermentation process optimization strategy to increase the acetoin yield, yield and production intensity to 51.9 g/l, 0.43 g/g and 1.44 g/l·h, respectively. . Afterwards, through adaptive evolution engineering based on continuous culture, a mutant strain that tolerates high concentrations of acetoin was obtained, and the acetoin yield reached 70 g/l after 40 hours of fermentation.

Acetoin is widely used in the food industry as a fragrance substance. As a platform compound prioritized by the US Department of Energy, acetoin is widely used in pharmaceutical, chemical and other fields. The current methods for producing acetoin include chemical synthesis, enzymatic conversion and microbial fermentation. Among them, the microbial fermentation method has the advantages of high production efficiency, wide raw material sources, high product purity, low production cost, and low environmental pollution.