Academic Lecture：Recent advances in downstream bioprocess engineering

Lecture Title：Recent advances in downstream bioprocess engineering

Speaker：Pau Loke Show, Associate Professor, The University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus (UNMC); Top 100 Asian Scientists (2017); Asia’s Rising Scientists Award (2017); Winner of Young Researcher in IChemE Malaysia Aaward (2016)

Lecture time: April 18, 2018 (Wednesday) 9:00-11:00 am

Lecture Venue: Room 303, School of Energy and Power Engineering

Lecture content：

Rapid improvements in bioseparation technology, new regulatory directives, product quality constraints, and the production efficiency have necessitated the development of more advanced and powerful downstream bioprocesses for biotechnology and biopharmaceuticals industrial. This has transformed in dramatically improvements in traditional bioseparation processes as well as the development of entirely new approaches. We highlight some of these recent advances. This includes extractive fermentation, extractive bioconversion aqueous two-phase system, aqueous two-phase flotation, and newly developed liquid biphasic flotation. Alcohol/salt liquid biphasic flotation (LBF) with aid of ultrasonication which have the ability of killing two birds with one stone, it not only capable in cell rupturing, it also able to recover bioproducts simultaneously and continuously. The effect of varying crude feedstock concentration, flotation time, type of salt, concentration of salt, type of alcohol, concentration of alcohol, initial volumes of salt and alcohol were investigated. The type of low molecular weight aliphatic alcohols include methanol, ethanol, 1-propanol and 2-propanol, whereas the type of salts tested were dipotassium hydrogen phosphate (K₂HPO₄), magnesium sulphate (MgSO₄), ammonium sulphate ((NH4)2SO4) and potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KH₂PO₄). The optimal condition for the microalgae protein extraction was achieved with ammonium sulphate at 250 g/L, 2-propanol at 60 % (v/v), V_R,initial of 1.0, crude biomass load of 20 g/L, air flowrate of 4 mm³/min and flotation time of 10 min. The recycling of phase components was also introduced to minimize the use of alcohol and salt in the corresponding LBF. It was demonstrated that top phase (alcohol) recycling can achieve increasing performance for three consecutive recycling runs. Under optimized process conditions, the proportion of protein recovered in the top phase was 88.86 % for the third recycle run in microalgae recovery studies.

Introduction of the presenter：

Associate Professor in Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, 43500 Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia.

Dr. Pau-Loke Show is the leader and founding director of Bioseparation Research Group in The University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus (UNMC). He also an Associate Professor at department of chemical and environmental engineering in UNMC. His research interests cover bioprocess engineering and bioseparation technology with focus on bioproducts recovery. He became Chartered Engineer with registered under Institute Chemical Engineer (IChemE), UK in 2017 and Professional Engineer with registered under Board of Engineer Malaysia in 2018. He has received numerous prestigious domestic and international academic awards, including Top 100 Asian Scientists 2017, Asia’s Rising Scientists Award 2017 and Winner of Young Researcher in IChemE Malaysia Aaward 2016. He published more than 80 journal papers and authored many books in less than 5 years. He is now serving as lead guest editor and editorial board member for two SCI-indexed journals, which are Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy (Impact Factor 3.34, Springer) and Biochemical Engineering Journal (Impact Factor 2.29, Elsevier).