Biocatalytic process intensification via efficient biocatalyst immobilization, miniaturization, and process integration

The Potential of Brewer’s Spent Grain in the Circular Bioeconomy: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

“…Biocatalysis and continuous processing were identified as crucial enabling technologies for the development of cost-efficient manufacturing with high-quality products and low waste generation, following the 12 principles of green chemistry (Žnidaršič-Plazl, 2021a;Žnidaršič-Plazl, 2021b). Enzymes are environmentally friendly catalysts that operate under mild conditions with high regio-, stereo-and reaction selectivity, making them key tools for single-step biotransformations up to total chemo-or multi-enzymatic syntheses (Wohlgemuth, 2021).…”

Photobiocatalysis in Continuous Flow

“…On the other hand, continuous flow reactors have been thoroughly studied in the last 2 decades, but especially in the last years this discipline has experienced a sharp increase in the number of publications, as seen in Figure 1, with several different reported applications of this technology, and a special emphasis in miniaturized flow reactors and also in carrying out reactions that underperform in batch (Valera et al, 2010;Plutschack et al, 2017;De Santis et al, 2020). This is not a surprise if we consider the many advantages that flow systems present over batch ones, especially when considering microscale reactors (Bolivar et al, 2011;Žnidaršič-Plazl, 2021a;Žnidaršič-Plazl, 2021b). Amongst these advantages we must mention that they are adequate for processes involving heterogeneous catalysis, such as those using immobilized enzymes (Gkantzou et al, 2018;Thompson et al, 2018), they have very fast mixing and heat exchange rate (Hartman et al, 2011;Gürsel et al, 2015;Cambie et al, 2016), large interfacial area when dealing with multiphase systems (Noël and Hessel, 2013;Mallia and Baxendale, 2016), improved reaction selectivity and reproducibility (Hartman et al, 2011;Talla et al, 2015;Cambie et al, 2016), simplified or even automated downstream processing (Webb and Jamison, 2010;Pastre et al, 2013;Fabry et al, 2014;Ley et al, 2015;Fabry et al, 2016), increased operational safety (Gutmann et al, 2015;Cambie et al, 2016) and, in the case of photoreactions, a reliable scale-up and an improved irradiation of the reaction mixture (Geyer et al, 2006;Wegner et al, 2011;Su et al, 2014;Su et al, 2016).…”

From Coiled Flow Inverter to Stirred Tank Reactor – Bioprocess Development and Ontology Design

“…Good mixing, short residence time as well as a narrow residence time distribution result in high yield and selectivity, which makes microreactors interesting for chemical and biochemical process industry [2]. Microreactors, in particular miniaturized bioreactors have gained acceptance as a tool for obtaining process-relevant data in the early stages of process development [3,4]. These devices are an attractive alternative in bioprocess development and intensification because of a high degree of control over process variables and the possibility to reduce time and cost factors [5,6].…”