Sponsor: DFG
Contact person: Marcel Schrader
Summary of the overall project:
This project is part of the DFG priority programme DiSPBiotech (SPP 1934), which research is focused on dispersity-, structural- and phase-changes of proteins and biological agglomerates in biotechnological processes. Especially filamentous microorganisms are widely used by the industrial biotechnology for the production of chemical and pharmaceutical substances. The morphology of these microorganisms ranges, dependent on the process parameters (e.g. pH-value, cultivation media composition, mechanical stress, inoculum concentration), from loose mycelium to highly branched pellets. This project investigates the effect of micro- (<30 µm) and macro-particle (up to 5 mm) addition on the morphology and the linked productivity of the filamentous actinomycetes Lentzea aerocolonigenes. The application of both particle types showed already significantly increased concentrations of the antibiotic Rebeccamycin, apperently due to different phenomena: physico-chemical surface effects when micro-particles were added and mechanical stress when macro-particles were supplemented to the cultivation batch. By linking experiments and simulation, the underlying mechanisms of action are to be identified and quantified in order to build empirical-mechanistic models.
Goals and tasks of iPAT
Project partners:Chair of Process Systems Engineering, TUM; Chemical & Process Engineering Dept., TU Berlin; Chair of Measurement and Control, TU Berlin; Dept. Applied and Molecular Microbiology
Fig. : CFD-DEM-Simulation of a shake flask with glass beads (left); illustration of a pellet-glass-bead collision (middle); pellet slice with a micro-particle core (right)