Parallel bioreactor system

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The applying consortium deal with the development of novel processes for the discovery, synthesis, structure elucidation and production of bioactive natural products of microbial origin. In recent years, more than 100 new bioactive natural substances have been discovered within the consortium, incuding several novel scaffolds. However, the newly discovered natural substances can often only be produced in small quantities. The isolated small amounts are usually only sufficient for carrying out the structural elucidation of a new natural substance, but not for detailed bioactivity studies as an essential step in evaluating the potential and possible further pharmaceutical development. Quantities in the higher milligram range are required for the componds development. So far, these quantities have been produced by massive parallelization in non-optimized shake flask cultures. This requires up to 200 parallel batches with a flask volume of 100 – 1000 mL. An increase in the isolated amounts of material by further increasing the working volumes is not possible with the existing infrastructure. Therefore, an optimized production of the substances in controlled bioreactors is essential for the efficient implementation and further development of research. The working groups have two individual fermenters (4 and 8 liters), which are in principle suitable for production, but can only be used suboptimal due to the lack of an infrastructure for optimizing the production conditions. A direct transfer of the production conditions from a shake flask to such a bioreactor is not possible. A system with several small fermenters is therefore required for optimization and process development, which enables the systematic adjustment of cultivation parameters in an experiment. Such a facility is not available in the working groups and, due to the large number of the experiments to be carried out, is also not accessible through cooperation. In order to close this equipment gap, the purchase of a system with 8 parallel bioreactors is requested. The number of individual reactors results from the need to be able to investigate the influence of several cultivation conditions on production in one experiment and to have sufficient biological replicates available. The fermentation system applied for should have standard and essential equipment parts such as temperature, pH and level controls, measurement of dissolved oxygen and redox potential as well as fermentation gases, gassing with mass flow meter and pump modules for feeding of various compounds, which impact the process (lye, acid, antifoam agent) and nutrients.