Can imperfections help to improve bioreactor performance?

Pilot-scale and larger bioreactors differ from small laboratory-scale reactors in terms of a greater occurrence of noise and incomplete mixing of the broth. Conventional control tries to induce good mixing and to filter out the noise as completely as possible. As such an ‘ideal’ operation is difficult to achieve, recent work has tried to exploit the non-ideal features to improve the performance. Using artificial neural networks, the degree of mixing, the extent of filtering of noise and the distribution of plasmid copy number (in a recombinant fermentation) can be controlled effectively on-line. This strategy generates better productivities than well-mixed noise-free operations, which suggests that deviations from ideal behaviour should be gainfully harnessed and not suppressed.