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

这个项目将通过提供一个高度仪器化的发酵设施，允许大四专业的学生将他们的项目从单一的实验室摇瓶扩大到在线生产水平，从而改善生物技术的本科实验室工作。虽然生物技术是一个多元化的跨学科领域，但它的起源是生物学。曼卡托的生物系在定义和开发将构成生物技术主要计划的内容方面发挥了主导作用。曼卡托州立大学的学生在该项目的最后一年前完成一系列严格挑选的生物、化学和物理课程。在大四期间，学生们参加课堂和实验室，以解决该学科中的一个主要问题：“扩大规模”。为了做到这一点，学生们注册了一个名为生物工程分析的四分之三的序列，同时还在一个生物技术实验室学习。前者向学生介绍放大生物转化的分析方面，后者要求学生在设计和执行项目时应用这些原则。更具体地说，学生们将在教师或赞助行业感兴趣的项目上分组工作，并负责分离/构建进行生物转化的有机体，然后扩大过程。学生们将亲身使用这个高度仪表化的发酵设备，利用他们的工程技能来优化和扩大他们的项目。

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.