Low-cost microbioreactor for high-throughput bioprocessing

Abstract

The design of a microbioreactor is described. An optical sensing system was used for continuous measurements of pH, dissolved oxygen, and optical density in a 2 mL working volume. The KLa of the microbioreactor was evaluated under different conditions. An Escherichia coli fermentation in both the microbioreactor and a standard 1 L bioreactor showed similar pH, dissolved oxygen, and optical density profiles.%The low cost of the microbioreactor, detection system, and the small volume of the fermentation broth provide a basis for development of a multiple‐bioreactor system for high‐throughput bioprocess optimization. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Biotechnol Bioeng 72: 346–352, 2001.

Continuous perfusion microfluidic cell culture array for high-throughput cell-based assays

“…Currently, cellbased drug screening assays have been implemented for numerous molecular interactions, including ion channel activity (Denyer et al, 1998;Gonzalez et al, 1999), Gprotein-coupled receptor response (Conway et al, 1999), and induction of apoptosis (Lee et al, 2003). Multiplexed devices such as microtiter plates and array bioreactors have been developed for large-scale screening applications (Kostov et al, 2001;Maffia et al, 1999). While such advances have greatly improved throughput, limitations include high cost of operation and inability to continuously monitor cells over long periods of time.…”

Development of a simple and low cost microbioreactor for high-throughput bioprocessing

“…In view of this, there is therefore a need to develop a microbioreactor that would address the following: process control, waste reduction, and high-throughput, speed-up testing, parallel investigation and optimisation. Previous work (Kostov et al 2001;Zanzotto et al 2004) has shown that microbioreactors provide unique environments, which are ideal for rapid and efficient biosynthesis due to the scale dependence of thermal and mass transfers.…”

Development of a small-scale bioreactor: Application to in vivo NMR measurement

“…The bioreactor's level of versatility in culturing different cell types is a determinant parameter. Mechanically stirred configurations such as those of Lamping et al (2003) and Kostov et al (2001) may not be suitable for shear-sensitive cells, such as animal and plant cells, and may perturb the coherence of the NMR magnetic field. An airlift bioreactor has also been used to study suspension plant cells (Fox et al, 1989).…”