Fuels and industrial chemicals

Large-scale cell culture in biotechnology

The purpose of this article is to review the current state of large-scale cell culture in terms of its applications, problems, and potential. Because of the commercial and proprietary nature of most large-scale cell culture processes, this review does not contain many detailed scientific results although an attempt is made to address some key issues and findings. Much of this summary deals with processes having an established, commercial track record but some attention is given to more recent innovations with interesting potential applications. Reference is made to plant cell culture but the main emphasis is on mammalian cells.

Fuels and industrial chemicals through biotechnology. 2

An overview of research on the biotechnical production of fuels and industrial chemicals during the two-year period of 1983-1984 is presented. Ethanol fermentation has continued to be the subject of major interest. A considerable amount of work has been directed to alternative feedstocks such as pentose sugars and lactose, and to bacterial fermentations. Reports on extrusion cooking as a continuous pretreatment method for subsequent ethanol fermentation, and on novel alternative downstream processing techniques have been published. In addition to ethanol fermentation, much attention has been paid to the biotechnical production of 2,3-butanediol, and of a number of organic and amino acids. In general, there appears to be a growing interest in the application of biocatalysis for the production of specialty chemicals, although only a few examples will be discussed in this paper. The construction of a demonstration plant to produce ethanol from molasses by a two 10 kL bed-volume immobilized yeast bioreactors at the Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Company Hofu plant, the announcement by Nitto Chemical Industries Company to begin the biotechnical production of acrylamide, and the French decision to construct pilot plants for the biotechnical production of acetone-butanol-ethanol cosolvent and of ethanol from renewable resources represent major scale-up developments.