Commercial production cells culture comparisons

The ionophores and several other specialty products are included in Table 13.8 for comparison purposes. Products of mammalian cell culture such as plasminogen activator and erythropoietin are included as fermentation products in this listing because they are normally manufactured by cellular processes in bioreactors. Aside from the five commodity chemicals in this table, the most dramatic change in the commercial chemicals produced by fermentation results from the impact of genetic engineering and recombinant DNA methods on the specialty products. Antibiotics and biopolymers (hormones, enzymes, etc.) with molecular structures too complex for conventional chemical synthesis will continue to be manufactured by microbial processes (Hinman, 1993). 

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