Microbial Fermentation Lab

Catalog description

Microbial fermentation generates products for every facet of life. The technology is used in the food, pharmaceutical, biologics, enzyme, and green technology industries, as a few examples. This course will provide students with hands-on experience setting up, operating and analyzing fermentations. Students will learn how to conduct growth studies in shake flasks and in a fermentor, induce protein production and perform assays to measure growth and product yields. Experiments will be conducted with a microbial strain expressing a protein. Good documentation is key for regulated industries and will be a key feature for assessing student performance in the course. Students will keep accurate detailed experimental plans, lab notebooks, batch records, analysis results and experimental reports. Teams will give oral presentations of their results and participate in group discussions comparing the different results.