SUMMARY
Propionic acid bacteria, including Propionibacterium acidipropionici, are widely used in the chemical industry to produce propionic acid and also for food and feed preservation. However, the efficiency of the industrial production of these bacteria is limited by their sensitivity to high concentrations of propionic acid excreted into the cultivation medium. Therefore, the development of new biotechnological processes and strains able to overcome this limitation and to improve the profitability of the microbiological production remains a relevant problem. A new P. acidipropionici FL-48 strain characterized by an increased resistance to 10 g/L of propionic acid (the number of viable cells after 24-h cultivation reached 1.05 × 106) was developed by a two-step induced mutagenesis using UV and diethyl sulphate from the P. acidipropionici VKPM B-5723 strain. The mutant strain exceeded the parental strain in the biomass accumulation rate and the amount of produced propionic and acetic acids by 35%, 20%, and 16%, respectively. The stability of such important characteristics as the biomass accumulation rate and the viability on media containing heightened concentrations of propionic acid was confirmed by three sequential monoclonal subculturings on a medium supplemented with 10 g/L of propionic acid. The optimization of the cultivation technology made it possible to determine the optimum seed inoculum dose (10% of the fermentation medium volume) and the best pH level for the active growth stage (6.1 ± 0.1). The scaling up of the fermentation to a 100-L bioreactor under observance of optimum cultivation conditions demonstrated a high biomass growth rate with a sufficient reproducability; after 20 h of fermentation, the number of viable cells in the culture broth exceeded 1 × 1010 CFU/mL. The new strain could be interesting as the component of silage and haylage biopreservatives and also could be used as an efficient producer of propionic acid.