16. Online Monitoring of Fermentation Processes Via Non-Invasive Low-Field NMR
Dirk Kreyenschulte, Eva Paciok, Lars Regestein, Bernhard Blümich, Jochen Büchs, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, (2015), 112 (9), 1810-1821, DOI: 10.1002/bit.25599
For the development of biotechnological processes in academia as well as in industry new techniques are required which enable online monitoring for process characterization and control. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a promising analytical tool, which has already found broad applications in offline process analysis. The use of online monitoring, however, is oftentimes constrained by high complexity of custom-made NMR bioreactors and considerable costs for high-field NMR instruments (>US$200,000). Therefore, low-field 1H NMR was investigated in this study in a bypass system for real-time observation of fermentation processes. The new technique was validated with two microbial systems. Both applications clearly demonstrate that the investigated technique is well suited for reaction monitoring in opaque media while at the same time it is highly robust and chemically specific. It can thus be concluded that low-field NMR spectroscopy has a great potential for non-invasive online monitoring of biotechnological processes at the research and practical industrial scales