Microbioreactors (MBRs) are cultivation platforms with a volume less than 1 mL for the cultivation of microorganisms or cell cultures under defined conditions. Due to their small size, MBRs are a promising alternative to accelerate the development of tailored drugs in future. Therefore, they can be used to optimize the production process of biopharmaceuticals as well as to screen active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) in bacterial or mammalian cell cultures. Furthermore, due to their small space requirements, MBRs can be highly parallelized to perform a large number of experiments in parallel. By automatization of MBRs, the workload and therefore the development costs of bioprocesses can be significantly reduced. Moreover, the small volume leads to a lower consumption of cost-intensive test substances and to the economical use of limited, expensive quantities of API. These advantages are particularly pronounced for small MBRs with a volume of less than 10 µL. One challenge with these MBRs is often the generation of process data, as only non-invasive fibre optic sensors can be implemented in a confined space due to the small cultivation volume. Therefore, a novel capillary-wave microbioreactor (cwMBR) with a volume of only 7 µL was equipped with optical sensors for parallel measurement of glucose and biomass concentration as well as dissolved oxygen tension and pH value. The optical glucose sensor operates according to a new principle for MBRs and measures the oxygen consumption of the enzyme glucose oxidase. Such a high level of sensor integration in an MBR below 10 µL has not been achieved before. The comprehensive sensor technology was successfully validated in parallel cultivations of the bacterium Escherichia coli.
Original Article:
Viebrock, K., Rabl, D., Meinen, S., Wunder, P., Meyer, J.-A., Frey, L. J., Rasch, D., Dietzel, A., Mayr, T. & Krull, R. Microsensor in Microbioreactors: Full Bioprocess Characterization in a Novel Capillary-Wave Microbioreactor. Biosensors 12; 10.3390/bios12070512 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/bios12070512