Bioreactors

Abstract

Bioprocess technology/engineering deals with the development and applications of competent strains of microorganisms for their optimum metabolite production in a specialized bioreactor, depending on the growth kinetics and nature of metabolite production at their suitable physicochemical and nutritional levels. However, three important components are taken under consideration involving several microbiological and biochemical engineering skills, also known as biomolecular engineering along with architecture and design of bioreactor systems, because the design and architecture of a bioreactor is solely based on the nature of the microorganisms, growth, and metabolite production along with the elimination of toxic substances during fermentation. In the current scenario, the development of bioreactor technology can change any process parameters economically with greater productivity and quality of microbial products, therefore, the design and architecture of a bioreactor is important, and can make a new revolution in bioprocess engineering. The mutational and recombinant DNA technology has developed several beneficial microorganisms, and their large-scale economical production requires fermentation technology mainly in the development of suitable bioreactor systems and process parameters. Much work has been done by microbiologists and biochemists for the production of various microbial metabolites including enzymes, hormones, polysaccharides, organic acids, vitamins, and so on at laboratory scale through flask culture experiments, whereas commercial-scale production requires several correction factors as well as a specialized bioreactor for continuous production of microbial metabolites with minimum energy consumption. The importance of bioreactor systems and their evaluation for the architecture requires optimization of fermentation parameters by a benchtop fermentor, and then a bioreactor should be fabricated on the guidelines of the microbiologist adopting the corrective measures of several growth parameters for the optimum production of microbial metabolites.