sbi webinar - Smart Shake Flasks: How Modern Sensors Can Redefine Your Bioprocess

On 23 March, sbi, Scientific Bioprocessing and LabManager hosted a webinar on the topic Smart Shake Flasks: How Modern Sensors Can Redefine Your Bioprocess which attracted great interest in the field. Their guest speaker was Raul Reveles, Senior Bioprocess Engineer at Bond Pet Foods – a company that uses biotechnology to produce alternative meat proteins for a variety of pet food applications.

Raul talked about the challenges he faced when screening for optimal media compositions in shake flasks - the most used small-scale cultivation vessel in microbial fermentation laboratories. Their ease-of-use and low cost per experiment provide an ideal set-up for screening strains and different conditions in lower volumes. However, traditionally shake flasks are black-box vessels. Available manual sampling methods cannot provide enough information to understand one’s bioprocess fully.

"You don't get more product by trying to get more product, but by gaining more insights into your process”, Raul mentioned stressing the importance of a well-monitored bioprocess, also - or especially - in shake flasks. He demonstrated how he optimized his screening process by using automated, online biomass monitoring sensors for his shake flask experiments.

These new, modern sensor technologies allowed him to monitor cell growth non-invasively, automatically, and in real-time. With this set-up, he obtained in-depth insights into his process and saved up to $70k in labor costs and optimized nutrient compositions, due to better process understandings.

The on-demand webinar is available free of charge here: Smart Shake Flasks: How Modern Sensors Can Redefine Your Bioprocess | Lab Manager