Microbial R&D-scale Fermentation Services and Development Challenges

Posted by beauty33 on March 16th, 2021

Fermentation is a process in which engineered microorganisms produce a large number of value-added intermediates or chemicals in a designed bioreactor. These products can be food supplements, medicines, industrial platform compounds, etc. As part of the upstream process, fermentation occurs before recovery, purification, preparation, filling and packaging in the biomanufacturing workflow. Creative Biogene has many years of experience in fermentation process development, and the services it provides are designed to provide customers with laboratory-level and pilot-scale fermentation services, as well as upstream and downstream processing development for R&D projects.

Humans have been conducting fermentation experiments for thousands of years. However, bringing fermentation to an industrial scale is not simple. From technical barriers to regulations, industrial companies face many challenges. Fermentation is a biological process, and several parameters in the fermentor may cause production failure. Some bottlenecks may also be encountered during the fermentation process.

Insufficient purity of the fermentation feedstock or the presence of stress-causing chemicals in the culture medium are common problems in biofuel production. Most microorganisms will be inhibited by the presence of alcohol or organic acids (two components usually involved in this process). The presence of harmful competitive microorganisms or bacteriophages in the fermentor may cause partial or total yield loss. Industrial fermentation requires a sterile production environment.

Product inhibition is also a technical obstacle to be considered is a type of enzyme inhibition, in which the product of the enzyme reaction binds to the enzyme and inhibits its activity. Microorganisms cannot process economically viable raw materials. One example is the production of vanillin through fermentation. Various precursors of the vanillin biosynthetic pathway in microorganisms, such as eugenol or ferulic acid, can be used. Ferulic acid can be recovered from agricultural plant waste, which is a cheap raw material for biological production. However, the recovery of ferulic acid from plant cell walls seems somewhat complicated and expensive.

Recombinant strains of bacteria, fungi, and yeast are interesting alternatives to wild-type strains, and various methods have been developed to engineer and optimize the bioconversion of various precursors to vanillin. Other bottlenecks that may arise, such as ineffective metabolic processes, expensive downstream processing methods due to the physicochemical properties of the substrates and products, and further metabolism of the required microorganisms by selected microorganisms.

All these technical issues may indirectly affect costs by affecting production schedule and product quality or involving other R&D stages. As a key technology in the bioeconomy, industrial fermentation must also deal with sustainability and regulatory pressures. 

The scientists in Creative Biogene work on a variety of microorganisms, including E. coli, yeast, fungi, bacillus, filamentous bacteria and marine bacteria. With many years of experience in strain genetic engineering, they have possessed cutting-edge fermentation technology for clone selection and optimization. Before large-scale fermentation, fermentation process optimization is one of the most critical parts to achieve high yield and relatively low cost. Microbisoci professionals have a wide range of strategies and technologies, and can optimize culture conditions such as culture medium, temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen through classic optimization methods. These methods include statistical media optimization, response surface methods and other techniques.

In addition, Microbiosci provides a wide range of downstream processing services, including broth recovery, biomass separation, cell disruption, purification, analysis and packaging services. Products can be biomass, chemistry, small biologically active molecules. Combining our integrated technology, extensive development tools and advanced manufacturing systems, we can help you deal with any downstream processing issues. At Microbiosci, the manufacturing process is operated through four fermentation models, such as batch, fed-batch, open and continuous systems. Fed-batch fermentation model is the most common in industrial manufacturing.