At NIZO we have:
• a closed and well de-aerated robotic screening setup available for designing and testing media. Sterilization and de-aeration of complex media in UHT systems ensures proper growth of bacteria, selected from these niches and maintain maximal nutritional value whilst minimizing Maillard-reactions.
• A high & medium throughput probiotic optimization pipeline (96 well plate, 0.5 L and 2 L vats) for fully anaerobic and efficient screening in a single assay. The full production process including growth, concentration, lyophilization and shelf-life stability testing is downscaled to We screen for medium, for interaction effects of different medium components pH’s and cryoprotectants, and for the optimal growth phase for harvesting.
• Medium scale DSP optimization at the 2 liter scale allows for testing the influence of downstream processing using industrial scalable technologies as cross-flow filtration and centrifugation for concentration prior to lyophilization of the cells and shelflife stability testing.
‘Next generation’ probiotics are originating from niches like the (human) gut, skin or oral cavity. These live biotherapeutic products often prove very difficult to culture as many of them have never been used in industrial applications and a large number of them are strict anaerobes.