Fermentation industrial plant

Until other gibbereUins (- 80) can be either fermented or synthesized in bulk, their future is uncertain for use as industrial plant growth regulators except in very special circumstances. 

There are a few other kinds of industrial plants. An air-lift tower fermenter was developed by ICI for the production of single-cell protein from methanol which employs an external loop for heat removal. Trickle beds for the treatment of waste waters employ packing structures or packing elements of 4-6 cm dia and porosities above 50%. Microbial films are formed on the packing that react with the organic substrate and the air as the liquid flows down and the air up. 

Weizmann discovered a process to produce butyl alcohol and acetone from the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum in 1914. With England s urgent demand for acetone, Winston Churchill (1874-1965) enlisted Weizmann to develop the Weizmann process for acetone production on an industrial scale. Large industrial plants were established in Canada, India, and the United States to provide the allies with acetone for munitions. Weizmann, who is considered the father of industrial fermentation, obtained significant status from his war contributions and used this to further his political mission of establishing a Jewish homeland. Weizmann was a leader of the Zionist movement and campaigned aggressively until the nation of Israel was established in 1948. He was the first president of Israel. 

The incomplete comprehension of mass transfer mechanisms in ED membrane systems is in all probability responsible for the difficult design of industrial plants and for their limited diffusion. For instance, in the food biotechnology sector ED applications are still in their infancy since quite a limited number of the novel processes studied so far in laboratory- and pilot-scales and reviewed here have been converted into industrial realities yet, except for the recovery of the sodium salt of unspecified organic acid from clarified fermentation broths, as well as amino and organic acids (Gillery et al., 2002). 

Wilke, D. 1999. Chemicals From Biotechnology Molecular Plant Genetics Will Challenge the Chemical and the Fermentation Industry. Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol., 52, 135-145. 

Industrial plants are characterized by high humidity, ambient temperatures up to 40 °C, large temperature variations, water and steam outlets, and continuous vibration. The complex composition of fermentation broth and high and variable concentrations of certain components are additional problems. 

In commercial plants, programmable logic controllers and process computers enable both process automation and labor-savings. The present and likely future uses of computer applications to fermentation processes in pilot and industrial plants are summarized in Table 5. In the table, open circles indicate items that have already been discussed in other reports while the open triangles are those topics to be elaborated here. 

Panahi M, Alii Z, Cheng X, et al. Recombinant protein expression plasmids optimized for industrial E. coli fermentation and plant systems produce biologically active human insulin-like growth factor-1 in transgenic rice and tobacco plants. Transgenic Res., 2004 13(3) 245-259. 

In this example airlift bioreactors were used as it was generally assumed that plant cells are difficult to grow in stirred fermentors, due to their sensitivity for shear forces. However recent studies in our laboratories have shown that this is not a general characteristic of plant cells. Efforts to measure the shear sensitivity of Catharanthus roseus cell cultures were not succesful, as even at stirrer speeds as high as 1000 rpm (normal speed 100 rpm) in a 3 1 vessel, the cells were still viable after one month. Similar results were found for tobacco cell cultures (6). This means that stirred fermentors can also be considered for large scale culture, which makes the economy more favourable, as such fermentors do already exist in fermentation industry, whereas airlift bioreactors are scarcely used. 

---