Downstream Processing
The purification and downstream processing in the biotechnology denotes any process that will be used for the separation of fermentation products from a fermentation broth of a biotechnological process. This term includes all mechanical, thermal, electrical and physico- chemical methods, which allow a separation of the product.
Process Description
Purification of the product takes place through a series of processing steps intended to increase and assure the purity of the final products. One of the first steps of the separation of the microorganism ( cell separation ), the product material is obtained outside of the organism, or to be carried out after completion of the cell disruption, separation of products from the cell interior. This is followed by the isolation (capture ) of the product from the fermentation broth and closes at the conclusion of the product in several purification steps ( polishing) is enriched. The conclusion is the formulation of the final product in the desired purity. Within the biotechnological process, the purification of the highest percentage of process costs that these are normally in the 40 to 60 % of the total cost, but can be very expensive make -to-clean products such as recombinant proteins or monoclonal antibodies for medical use to over 80 % of the cost for.
The number of cleaning steps will depend on the desired purity of the end product, as well as the initial concentration in the fermentation broth from. As the number of purification steps, the increase in purity per cleaning step decreases, also occurs in all purification steps, a loss of product, whereby the yield of products decreases with the number of purification steps.
Applied methods
- Mechanical separation (for example, centrifugation, sedimentation, filtration, flotation)
- Thermal processes (eg crystallization, evaporation, rectification, distillation, chromatography, dialysis (chemistry) )
- Electrical methods (eg Magnetic separation, electrolysis)
- Physico- chemical processes (eg reactive precipitation, polymerization, depolymerization, derivatization )