Yield and Purification
Rarely do antibiotic-producing strains just isolated from nature
produce an antibiotic at sufficiently high concentration that commercial
production can begin immediately. So one of the major
tasks of the industrial microbiologist is to isolate high-yielding
strains. Strain selection may involve mutagenizing the wild-type
organism to obtain mutant derivatives that are so altered that they
overproduce the antibiotic of interest. Product yield is a central
issue with virtually all pharmaceuticals, and even after commercial
production of an antibiotic has begun, research often continues
to obtain higher-yielding strains or a more efficient process.