Industrial Cell Culture and Immunology Lab

Catalog description

This laboratory course teaches the skills needed to serve as a technician in biotechnology production. Students grow and monitor bacterial, yeast, and mammalian cells on a laboratory scale that emulates the large-scale production used in industry. Students will become familiar with the cleaning, sterilization, aseptic inoculation, operation, and monitoring of fermenters and bioreactors. Students then recover and purify proteins produced by those cell cultures. They recover and purify proteins using centrifugation, ultrafiltration, and chromatography techniques. Protein products are subjected to a variety of quality control assays such as the LAL assay, ELISA, and immunoblotting. The course emphasizes the use of current Good Manufacturing Processes (cGMP), and students gain experience following Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs) required to produce FDA-regulated products.