From Cellular Function to Industrial Products

Abstract

The Biotech industry is one of the fastest growing industrial sectors, and in recent years many new products have been launched. Thus, many new pharmaceuticals are currently produced based on growth of microbial and cell cultures, but also — to the benefit of the environment — many classical chemical products are today produced through recruitment of cell factories. The exploitation of cell cultures for production of industrial products involves growth of the cells in so-called bioreactors, and this is often referred to as a fermentation process. The term fermentation is derived from Latin fervere, to boil, and it has been used to describe the metabolism of sugars by microorganisms since ancient times. Thus fermentation of fruits is so old that ancient Greeks attributed its discovery to one of their gods, Dionysos. Among the classical fermentation processes are: beer brewing, which is documented to have been widely known 3000 years B.C. in Babylonia, soy sauce production in Japan and China, and fermented milk beverages in the Balkans and in Central Asia. Before WWII fermentation processes, however, mainly found their application in the production of food and beverages, and it was only after the introduction of the penicillin production in the late 1940’s that large-scale fermentation found a use in the production of pharmaceuticals. Today fermentation processes are used in the production of a broad spectrum of products and these processes can be divided into seven categories according to the product made (Table 2.1). Besides the use of fermentation processes for the production of specific products, these processes are also used extensively for specific biotransformations, e.g., in the conversion of sorbose to sorbitol (an important step in the chemical synthesis of vitamin C), as they offer the possibility to perform site-specific chemical modifications.