Bioprocess Engineering: Basic Concepts, 3rd Edition

11. Recovery and Purification of Products

The recovery and purification of a fermentation product is essential to any commercial process. The difficulty entailed depends heavily on the nature of the product. Products may be the biomass itself, an extracellular component, or an intracellular component. Since the chemical nature of a fermentation or cell culture broth is quite complex and extremely high purity is required for some products (e.g., some pharmaceuticals), recovery and purification often require many processing steps and in many cases represent a manufacturing cost higher than that involved in producing the product. Since the compounds of interest are often heat or oxygen sensitive and present in dilute aqueous solution, the traditional ...