Examination of Innovative High-Throughput Fermentations

Abstract

During the investigation of fermentations, issues such as the need for numerous parallel experiments with regard to strain improvement or screening were often met, or in the case of media optimization the need for online measurements to avoid a lack of night-samples was also required. Therefore, several new instruments were introduced to solve one or more of these problems: impedimetric- and reverse-spin-technologies (RST) were compared via fermentation of a well-known species of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, under both aerobic and anaerobic conditions, resulting in a diauxic growth curve. To identify the most accurate method, a wellknown mathematical description was fitted to the measured data. Since the initial parameters were considered reliable as they originated from real experiments, during model fitting, the parameters were further fine-tuned, and the less modifications reported the better the system since it produces a growth curve that is more similar to standard bioreactors. According to our study, the impedimetric equipment was more efficient, and could run 40 parallel experiments, but the RST was more flexible.

Keywords

• fermentation
• high-throughput
• scale-down
• online measurement
• mathematical modelling