The environment created on Earth within a clinostat or Rotating Wall Vessel (RWV) bioreactor is often referred to as "simulated microgravity". Both devices utilize constant reorientation to effectively nullify cumulative sedimentation of particles. Neither, however, can fully reproduce the concurrent lack of structural deformation, displacement of intercellular components and/or reduced mass tr...

A bioreactor can be defined as a device that uses mechanical means to influence biological processes. In tissue engineering bioreactors can be used to aid in the in vitro development of new tissue by providing biochemical and physical regulatory signals to cells and encouraging them to undergo differentiation and/or to produce extracellular matrix prior to in vivo implantation. This chapter dis...

BACKGROUND Recombinant proteins are usually required in laboratories interested in the protein but not in the production process itself. Thus, technical equipment which is easy to handle and straight forward protein production procedures are of great benefit to those laboratories. Companies selling single use cultivation bags and bioreactors are trying to satisfy at least part of these needs. H...

An important issue in tissue engineering concerns the possibility of limited tissue ingrowth in tissue-engineered constructs because of insufficient nutrient transport. We report a dynamic flow culture system using high-aspect-ratio vessel rotating bioreactors and 3D scaffolds for culturing rat calvarial osteoblast cells. 3D scaffolds were designed by mixing lighter-than-water (density, <1g/ml)...

Critical size skeletal defects resulting from trauma and pathological disorders still remain a major clinical problem worldwide. Bone engineering aims at generating unlimited amounts of viable tissue substitutes by interfacing osteocompetent cells of different origin and developmental stage with compliant biomaterial scaffolds, and culture the cell/scaffold constructs under proper culture condi...

The need to mitigate nitrate export from corn and soybean fields with subsurface (tile) drainage systems, a major environmental issue in the midwestern United States, has made the efficacy of field-edge, subsurface bioreactors an active subject of research. This study of three such bioreactors located on the University of Illinois South Farms during their first 6 mo of operation (July-Dec. 2012...

Transgenic animal bioreactors can produce therapeutic proteins with high value for pharmaceutical use. In this paper, we compared different systems capable of producing therapeutic proteins (bacteria, mammalian cells, transgenic plants, and transgenic animals) and found that transgenic animals were potentially ideal bioreactors for the synthesis of pharmaceutical protein complexes. Compared wit...

Anaerobic biological wastewater treatment has numerous advantages over conventional aerobic processes; anaerobic biotechnologies, however, still have a reputation for low-quality effluents and operational instabilities. In this study, anaerobic bioreactors were augmented with an oxygen-transferring membrane to improve treatment performance. Two anaerobic bioreactors were fed a synthetic high-st...

This paper focuses on the recent research in the development of anaerobic membrane bioreactors in wastewater treatment. Anaerobic wastewater treatment technology is gaining increasing attention due to its capacity to convert wastewater BODs to usable biogas with relatively low energy consumption. The anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR), which is a combination of the anaerobic biological waste...

Background Hydrocyclones (HCs) have been recently extensively evaluated for their application in the separation of mammalian cells in perfusion bioreactors. The high centrifugal force derived within hydrocyclones is the key mechanism for cell separation inside such small-sized simple devices. This is usually accompanied by a very short residence time of the cells inside the separating equipment...