Fermentation biotechnology

This course aims to provide the theoretical and practical bases to set-up, manage and improve microbial biotechnological processes, for the industrial production of compounds. Focus is on bioreactor technology, scale-up strategies, understanding the importance of metabolic pathways on process development and on metabolic engineering strategies utilized to engineer microorganisms in the context of biotechnological applications. Several industrial examples will be showed and critically discussed.

Students will develop the capabilities for setting-up and manage an industrial fermentation process using microbial cells. More in detail they will acquire specific tools (bioreactor set-up and fermentation control, strain improvement, metabolic flux analysis and engineering, statistical analyses) in order to meet the demand of high productive and efficient industrial bioprocesses.