Examples, biochemical reaction engineering Chapter

Previous chapters in this volume have been concerned with chemical reaction engineering and refer to reactions typical of those commonplace in the chemical process industries. There is another class of reactions, often not thought of as being widely employed in industrial processes, but which are finding increasing application, particularly in the production of fine chemicals. These are biochemical reactions, which are characterised by their use of enzymes or whole cells (mainly micro-organisms) to carry out specific conversions. The exploitation of such reactions by man is by no means a recent development—the fermentation of fruit juices to make alcohol and its subsequent oxidation to vinegar are both examples of biochemical reactions which have been used since antiquity. 

The Gibbs free energy is a remarkable thermodynamic quantity. Because so many chemical reactions are carried out under conditions of near-constant pressure and temperature, chemists, biochemists, and engineers use the sign and magnitude of AG as exceptionally useful tools in the design of chemical and biochemical reactions. We will see examples of the usefulness of AG throughout the remainder of this chapter and this text... 

The following chapter shows the application of MS to metabolic flux analysis with different examples. Whereas some of them focus on flux quantification of only a single or a few selected reactions, others aim at the analysis of larger parts of the metabohsm. The overview given should illustrate the broad application potential of MS for metabohc flux analysis by examples from different fields of research. The majority of studies belongs to the medical field, whereas so far only few examples can be found in the area of biochemical engineering. 

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