Acquisition of a Highly Instrumented Fermentation Facility to Improve the Undergraduate Biotechnology Program

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This project will improve undergraduate laboratory work in Biotechnology by providing a highly instrumented fermentation facility which permits senior-year majors to scale up their projects from a single laboratory flask to an on-line production level. While biotechnology is a diverse interdisciplinary field, its origins are in biology. Mankato's Biology Department has played the leading role in defining and developing what will constitute the major program in biotechnology. Mankato State University students complete a rigorous selection of courses in biology, chemistry and physics prior to the senior year of the program. During the senior year the students are involved in classes and laboratories that address one of the major problems in the discipline: "scale-up". To accomplish this, students enroll in a three-quarter sequence entitled Biological Engineering Analysis and concurrently in a Biotechnology Laboratory. The former introduces the student to the analytical aspects of scaling up a bioconversion and the latter requires the student to apply these principles in the design and execution of a project. More specifically, students will work in teams on a project of interest to a faculty member or a sponsoring industry, and will be responsible for isolating/constructing an organism that carries out a bioconversion, and then scaling up the process. Students will have hands-on use of this highly instrumented fermenter facility, using their engineering skills to optimize and scale up their projects.