Bioreactors and bioseparation

Along with the rapid development of life science, great attention has been increasingly given to the biotechnological products of cell cultivation technology. In the course of industrialization, bioreactor and bioproduct separation techniques are the two essential technical platforms. In this chapter, the current situation and development prospects of bioreactor techniques in China are systematically discussed, starting with the elucidation of bioreactor processes and the principle of process optimization. Separation technology for biological products is also briefly introduced.At present, a series of bioreactors made by Chinese enterprises have been widely used for laboratory microbial cultivation, process optimization studies, and large-scale production. In the course of bioprocess optimization studies, the complicated bioprocesses in a bioreactor could be resolved into different reaction processes on three scales, namely genetic, cellular, and bioreactor scales. The structural varieties and nonlinear features of various scales of bioprocess systems was discussed through considering the mutual effects of different scale events, namely material flux, energy flux, and information flux, and the optimization approach for bioprocesses was proposed by taking the analysis of metabolic flux and multiscale consideration as a core strategy.In order to realize such an optimization approach, a bioreactor system based on association analysis of multiscale parameters was elaborated, and process optimization of many biological products were materialized, which resulted in great improvement in production efficiency. In designing and manufacturing large-scale bioreactors, the principle of scaling up a process incorporated with flow field study and physiological features in a bioreactor was suggested according to the criterion for the scale-up of cellular physiological and metabolic traits. The flow field features of a bioreactor were investigated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and the design of a bioreactor configuration was carried out depending on multiscale studies of parameters correlation in a bioprocess. With respect to the development trend of bioreactor studies in China, the significance of the development of microbioreactors for high throughput strain screening and large-scale bioreactors for animal cell cultivation were put forward. Finally, the importance of studies of systems biology for bioprocesses based on bioinformation processing was raised, and the necessity of establishing a bioprocess information database and local area network (LAN) were emphasized as well.Bioseparation engineering plays a key role in biotechnology production. At present, many difficulties need to be resolved in the area. Scientists of China have made considerable progress in bioseparation engineering. This progress includes chromatography media, recycling aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS), affinity precipitation, molecular imprinting, renaturation and modification of proteins, protein fractionation using ultrafiltration (UF), ion liquid separation of bioproducts, reverse micellar extraction, etc. The preparation of bioseparation materials, as well as part of bioseparation process research development in the past 5 years, are introduced here.