A novel reactor design incorporating porous ceramic tubes into a stirred jar fermentor was developed. The stirred ceramic membrane reactor has two ceramic tubular membrane units inside the vessel and maintains high filtration flux by alternating use for filtering and recovering from clogging. Each filter unit was linked for both extraction of culture broth and gas sparging. High permeability was maintained for long periods by applying the periodical control between filtering and air sparging during the stirred retention culture of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The ceramic filter aeration system increased the k(L)a to about five times that of ordinary gas sparing. Using the automatic feeding and filtering system, cell mass concentration reached 207 g/L in a short time, while it was 64 g/L in a fed-batch culture. More than 99% of the growing cells were retained in the fermentor by the filtering culture. Both yield and productivity of cells were also increased by controlling the feeding of fresh medium and filtering the supernatant of the dense cells culture. (c) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An automated control method of fed-batch culture in which the nutrient feed rate was determined from continuously measured cell concentration and culture broth volume was developed. Theoretical background was elucidated, from which it was found that the method is unique in that it controls specific substrate consumption rate of the microorganism. The method was experimentally applied to the fed-batch cultures of recombinant Escherichia coli HB101. It was observed that the specific substrate feed rate affects not only the specific growth rate but also the growth yield. If some conditions are satisfied, this type of automated fed-batch culture can be applied widely to any microbial systems and seems especially useful when the culture medium is composed of natural complex nutrient(s) because their concentrations are very difficult to detect and control.
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