Bioreactor Hints                                                                                      updated 3/3/2005

 

  1. Stay busy, and delegate responsibilities.
  2. Get the media prepared for the next class period.  Just set the lid on the media container in the refrigerator.  If you tighten the lid, the vessel will deform when cooled.
  3. Make arrangements to get it started early to monitor the appropriate time period.
  4. Don’t burn yourself on the autoclave.
  5. You will have to remember how to solve the first-order ODE.  There are several ways to do this.
  6. Living systems always have a bit of randomness, so some scatter is okay.
  7. Previous students have taken readings approximately every 20 minutes.
  8. Don’t allow the O2 level to drop below 30% on the digital readout!
  9. Each time the O2 is cycled, the system will take about 10 minutes to return to steady state.
  10. For the yeast calibration curve, be sure to have a wide range of concentration and absorbance data (probably from 0-15 g/L).
  11. It might be a good idea to record (using Bailey) all of the runs of a given day in one big file, as well as each run separately.  It is useful to have a consistent time scale.
  12. Yeast and Glucose concentration samples won’t necessarily increase or decrease for one given run. For an entire day, however, you should see a trend.