Despite numerous advances in compound identification and purification, the extraction techniques for metabolites from Streptomyces biomass have remained relatively unchanged. Accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) has been widely used in plant natural product discovery for the past two decades. Yet, to our knowledge, it has not been applied to Streptomyces biomass despite purported benefits in increasing extract yields. In this study, different ASE parameters were compared against traditional microbial biomass extraction techniques using Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2). Extraction efficacy was evaluated by quantifying the intracellular metabolites ectoine and undecylprodigiosin. In contrast to previous work with botanical metabolites, this study's findings suggest that ASE does not provide a significant advantage in extraction yield compared to traditional extraction techniques for Streptomyces biomass. The lack of increased metabolite yield per unit of biomass, in tandem with the disadvantages inherent to ASE, such as reduced scalability and potential for thermal degradation, indicates that ASE may lack a distinct advantage over traditional extraction methods for enhanced targeted metabolite recovery from Streptomyces biomass.
Bushman et al. (2026) studied this question.