Shake-Flask Feedback Controlled Feeding

Manuela Senn and Martin Ischebeck

GEN Vol. 33 No. 7, 2013

Online Measurement of DO with Chemical Optical Sensors

In bioprocess development for the production of pharmaceuticals, proteins, or nutritional additives, scale-down models are used to save time and costs when testing for suitable cell lines, media composition, and process conditions. However, it is often difficult to determine critical parameters for scale-up of processes at small scale. Shake flasks are commonly used in botech research and production. They represent a low-cost alternative to expensive larger-scale bioreactor systems and are a lot easier to handle. On the other hand there is no established system for online monitoring and control of important culture parameters at this scale. A reliable method for automated feeding and the elimination of manual sampling is needed to improve bioprocess development at shake-flask scale. In these experiments, a feedback-controlled system was tested that could be applied to shake-flask cultures.