Digitalization of bioprocess development

(M.Sc. Lukas Bromig)

The rapid acquisition of technically relevant process information is of great importance for the development of biotechnological production processes. The Institute of Biochemical Engineering has already miniaturized and parallelized stirred tank reactors and automated them with liquid handlers, paying particular attention to the simple scalability of bioprocesses to the litre and m3 scale.

Experimental design, resource planning of the devices in the bioprocess laboratory and evaluation of the experimental results have so far only been carried out intuitively according to the level of education and individual knowledge of the respective scientist.

The objective of this research project is therefore the use of intelligent software components for knowledge-based experimental design, for the procedural control of parallelised and automated laboratory experiments in real time (automation of bioprocess development) and for on-line data evaluation, in order to be able to drastically shorten development cycles in bioprocess design in the future. To this end, digital communication between the laboratory equipment used in the bioprocess laboratory and a laboratory information and management system (LIMS) must first be established. Subsequently, strategies are to be developed, implemented and experimentally validated which will enable the user-friendly optimal configuration of automated procedures in the digitized bioprocess laboratory without the creation of fixed schedules.

This work is carried out within the framework of the joint project Digitalization in Industrial Biotechnology (DigInBio), which is financially supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

 

Publications

  • Bromig L, Weuster-Botz D (2023): Accelerated adaptive laboratory evolution by automated repeated batch processes in parallelized bioreactors. Microorganisms 11: 275.
  • Bromig L, von den Eichen N, Weuster-Botz D (2022): Control of parallized bioreactors I: dynamic scheduling software for efficient bioprocess management in high-throughput systems, Bioproc Biosys Eng 45: 1927-1937.
  • Von den Eichen N, Osthege M, Dölle M, Bromig L, Wiechert W, Oldiges M, Weuster-Botz D (2022): Control of parallized bioreactors II: probabilistic quantification of carboyxlic acid reductase activity for bioprocess optimization, Bioproc Biosys Eng 45: 1939-1954.
  • Bromig L, Leiter D, Mardale A-V, von den Eichen N, Bieringer E, Weuster-Botz D (2022): The SiLA 2 manager for rapid device integration and workflow automation. SoftwareX 17: 100991.
  • Von den Eichen N, Bromig L, Sidarava V, Marienberg H, Weuster-Botz D (2021): Automated multi-scale cascade of parallel stirred-tank bioreactors for fast protein expression studies. J Biotechnol 332: 103-113.