Upstream process development for cultured red blood cell production

Production of cultured red blood cells (cRBCs) hold the promise of being a potentially unlimited source of cells that could cover the increasing demand of RBCs for transfusion purposes, while having more control on the quality and safety of the cells compared to the current donor-dependent system. cRBCs could also be used for novel therapies in...

Mimicked Mixing-Induced Heterogeneities of Industrial Bioreactors Stimulate Long-Lasting Adaption Programs in Ethanol-Producing Yeasts

Commercial-scale bioreactors create an unnatural environment for microbes from an evolutionary point of view. Mixing insufficiencies expose individual cells to fluctuating nutrient concentrations on a second-to-minute scale while transcriptional and translational capacities limit the microbial adaptation time from minutes to hours. This...

Downscaling Industrial-Scale Syngas Fermentation to Simulate Frequent and Irregular Dissolved Gas Concentration Shocks

In large-scale syngas fermentation, strong gradients in dissolved gas (CO, H₂) concentrations are very likely to occur due to locally varying mass transfer and convection rates. Using Euler-Lagrangian CFD simulations, we analyzed these gradients in an industrial-scale external-loop gas-lift reactor (EL-GLR) for a wide range of...

Monitoring Intracellular Metabolite Dynamics in Saccharomyces cerevisiae during Industrially Relevant Famine Stimuli

Carbon limitation is a common feeding strategy in bioprocesses to enable an efficient microbiological conversion of a substrate to a product. However, industrial settings inherently promote mixing insufficiencies, creating zones of famine conditions. Cells frequently traveling through such regions repeatedly experience substrate shortages and...

The Methanizer: A Small Scale Biogas Reactor for a Restaurant

The purpose of this study is to determine the technical and economic feasibility of a smallscale bioreactor called the Methanizer for a restaurant. The bioreactor converts organic waste produced by the restaurant into methane. This methane can be used to power the restaurant’s cooking stoves. The system proposed is a double-tank, batch-fed...

The methanizer: A small scale biogas reactor for a restaurant

The purpose of this study is to determine the technical and economic feasibility of a smallscale bioreactor called the Methanizer for a restaurant. The bioreactor converts organic waste produced by the restaurant into methane. This methane can be used to power the restaurant’s cooking stoves. The system proposed is a double-tank, batch-fed...

Hydrogel coated monoliths for enzymatic hydrolysis of penicillin G

The objective of this work was to develop a hydrogel-coated monolith for the entrapment of penicillin G acylase (E. coli, PGA). After screening of different hydrogels, chitosan was chosen as the carrier material for the preparation of monolithic biocatalysts. This protocol leads to active immobilized biocatalysts for the enzymatic hydrolysis of...

Development of a monolithic bioreactor: Design and application

Recently, biocatalysis has become an interesting alternative for conventional industrial processes. Enzyme reactions are highly selective and fast, and can be performed under ambient conditions. A drawback of the use of enzymes is their fragile nature. Stirring, high temperature, or solvents can cause deactivation. Also separation of the free...

Development of the Delft inclined plate (DIP) bioreactor