A mini bioreactor (3.0 mL volume) has been developed and shown to be a versatile tool for rapidly screening and quantifying the response of organisms on environmental perturbations. The mini bioreactor is essentially a plug flow device transformed into a well-mixed reactor by a recycle flow of the broth. The gas and liquid phases are separated by a silicone membrane. Dynamic mass transfer experiments were performed to determine the mass transfer capacities for oxygen and carbon dioxide. The mass transfer coefficients for oxygen and carbon dioxide were found to be 1.55 +/- 0.17 x 10(-5) m/s and 4.52 +/- 0.60 x 10(-6) m/s, respectively. Cultivation experiments with the 3.0 mL bioreactor show that (i) it can maintain biomass in the same physiological state as the 4.0 L lab scale bioreactor, (ii) reproducible perturbation experiments such as changing substrate uptake rate can be readily performed and the physiological response monitored quantitatively in terms of the O2 and CO2 uptake and production rates.
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