Artificial intelligence for bioreactors

For me bioprocess engineering is a somewhat boring topic. I remember the hours I spend on endless list of formulas, huge tables and dull calculations. However the whole field of bioprocess engineering and the optimalisation of bioreactors becomes alot more interesting when there is Artificial intelligence involved.

Microbial cells find a widespread use in industrial scale bioreactors to yield a product of interest. In most cases we wish to adjust the extracellular conditions of our used cells in such a way that the microbial population responds as we required, for example produce the most of a certain metabolite. This so called "tailoring" of the conditions requires judicious modeling and control, for this most conventional mathematical tools are less usable since they more suit ideal laboratory scale experiments.

The article Synthesizing cellular intelligence and artifical intelligence for bioprocesses by P.R. Patnaik (Biotechnol Adv 24, 129-33, 2006) reviews the current use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to describe and control the overall behavior of a population of living cells in a bioreactor. The use of AI seems promising in a large number of different applications of bioreactors, offering new strategies for analyzing, improving and optimizing microbial processes on an industrial scale.

It’s fascinating to see the application of AI in some of the classical examples of modern Biotechnology, like the use of a neuro-fuzzy estimator and internal model control to optimize a penicillin fermentation pilot plant, an example mentioned briefly in the article.