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What is a Bioreactor?
What is a bioreactor?
Bioreactors are vessels used to culture cells or microorganisms under tightly controlled conditions to provide optimal productivity, efficiency, and product quality. These vessels can be used to culture various types of animal and human cells. However, they’re also commonly used for the fermentation of microbes such as bacteria and yeast. Scientists who cultivate bacteria, yeast, or other fungi often use the term fermentor.
Bioreactors are useful for a wide range of applications at various scales of production. Continue reading to find out how the use of bioreactors can optimize your cell or microbial culture. Learn about the different components, cell types and applications suitable for bioreactor systems and receive expert advice on how to get started.
Bioreactors are useful for a wide range of applications at various scales of production. Continue reading to find out how the use of bioreactors can optimize your cell or microbial culture. Learn about the different components, cell types and applications suitable for bioreactor systems and receive expert advice on how to get started.
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Why should you consider using a bioreactor?
There are several benefits to culturing cells in bioreactors, compared to cultivating them in flasks or plates in shakers or incubators. Bioreactors are particularly useful to:
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Produce large quantities of cells
Stirred-tank bioreactors are scalable, meaning they allow increasing the size of the cultivation vessel instead of the number of vessels, so that the work and space requirements stay manageable. To compare, stirred-tank bioreactors can have working volumes of thousands of liters, whereas culture flasks and dishes are usually not bigger than a few liters. Furthermore, bioreactors facilitate to automatically adjust potentially growth-limiting parameters, like the oxygen concentration in the culture medium or the concentration of nutrients, and therefore support high cell densities.
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Decrease batch-to-batch variability
In bioreactors, critical process parameters, like pH, temperature, and dissolved oxygen can be continuously monitored in real-time using sensors and controlled at a setpoint. This is different from cultures in shakers or incubators, where often only the temperature is controlled. This helps increasing the reproducibility of culture growth, product formation, product characteristics, and more. Here you find more information about how bioprocess monitoring and control works.
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Find the best culture conditions
By using small, parallel bioprocess systems several bioprocesses can be run at the same time. This is a time-saving way to systematically analyze the influence of several parameters on the culture outcome.
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Shakers/incubators and bioreactors
If you are using bioreactors, you will probably use a shaker or incubator as well for early research and process development and inoculum preparation. This means, it depends on the application and the workflow stage, which cultivation system is the better choice.
- Get an overview on the strengths and weaknesses of shakers/incubators and bioreactors and at which workflow step the one or the other is particularly useful. Read more!
- Interested in an example? Read, how one of our customers optimized protein production in E. coli. Shake flasks were used at the beginning to optimize a range of process parameters. Subsequently, bioreactors have enabled a significant increase in productivity. Download case study!
What are the main components of a bioreactor?
Here we focus on stirred-tank bioreactors, which are the most common type of bioreactor. Cultivation takes place in the cylindrical bioreactor tank - often called a vessel. The culture is mixed by stirring using an impeller. Bioreactors are connected to a bioreactor control system for effective parameter monitoring and control. In addition to the bioreactor itself, bioreactor systems contain:
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- Sensors: These monitor key process parameters, including pH, dissolved oxygen and temperature continuously in real-time. Various types of sensors can be integrated into bioreactors.
- Control software: Based on sensor readings, the software calculates the adjustments to the system that are required to maintain parameter levels within their specified setpoint.
- Actuators: Regulated by the control software, actuators can be pumps, valves, or motors, that adjust the parameter back to its specified setpoint.
Which cell types can be cultured in bioreactors?
A broad range of cell types can be cultured in bioreactors, including:
- Mammalian cells , including stem cells
- Insect cells
- Bacteria
- Yeast and filamentous fungi
- Plant cells
What are typical application areas for bioreactors?
Bioreactors are typically used in life science and pharma field, for food and feed applicatons, and bio-based chemicals production. Find out more about the use of bioreactors in the different application areas.
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Life science and pharma
Bioreactors are an especially powerful resource in the biopharmaceutical industry. Various cell types, including those from mammals, insects, microbes and stem cells are frequently used in bioreactors for the production of therapeutic compounds to improve disease diagnosis and treatment. Bioreactors are used for the development and production of biopharmaceuticals, including:
- Cells for cell therapy and drug discovery applications
- Viral vectors
- Monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutic proteins, peptides, hormones and enzymes
- Exosomes
- Vaccines
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Food and feed
Furthermore, bioreactors are traditionally used in the food and feed industry for microbial fermentation to produce food, food additives, and beverages, including but not limited to:
The production of cultured n meat is an up-and-coming use of stem cell cultures in bioreactors.
- Beer, wine
- Dairy products
- Amino acids, vitamins, and flavors
The production of cultured n meat is an up-and-coming use of stem cell cultures in bioreactors.
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Chemicals
Bioreactors are also used in the chemicals industry to produce
- Biofuels
- Platform chemicals
- Biopolymers
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Which scales of production can bioreactors be used for?
Stirred-tank bioreactors are suitable for each stage of bioprocessing from small scale to production. Typically, we distinguish
- 100 mL range - small scale: Working volumes around 100 mL are typically used in R&D.
- Liter range - bench-scale: Working volumes of several liters are typically used for process development, during scale-up, and also for production processes.
- Hundreds of liters range - production-scale: Large-scale, commercial production often takes place in working volumes of hundreds or thousands of liters.
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Considering using bioreactor systems for your bioprocess?
Here’s how to get started.
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What you need to know before investing in a bioprocessing space in your lab:
There are important considerations to make when purchasing your first bioreactor. Get to know about the necessary lab infrastructure and about useful additional equipment like incubators and analyzers.
Contact us to select the right equipment
It can be challenging to pick the ideal bioprocess system for your needs. The right system to choose will depend on several factors: The organism being cultivated, the working volume and the cell line used, with particular regard to the oxygen demand and sensitivity to shear forces. We are specialists with extensive application experience and are happy to advise. Contact us for more information on Eppendorf bioprocessing solutions!
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