Development of a versatile and continuously operating cell disruption device

Cell disruption is a recurrent unit operation in biotechnology. Interesting biotechnological products like proteins, lipids or biopolymers are synthesized intracellularly and are often not secreted. Furthermore, cell-free biotechnology uses defined fractions of the cytoplasm for in vitro protein synthesis. Bacteria, yeast, algae and filamentous fungi are surrounded by rigid cell walls that have to be disrupted by physical, chemical or mechanical methods in order to retain the valuable cell content. High pressure homogenization is a widely used procedure to disrupt cells and it has been applied to bacteria, algae and yeast. However, the mode of cell disruption has not been fully elucidated and performance is not predictable, thus time consuming iterative cycles are always necessary to define the best parameters for each microorganism, chemical environment and the corresponding product. Therefore, physical parameters of different biological systems were analyzed and boundary conditions defined in order to construct an adjustable disruption device to allow economical efficient, predictable and adjustable cell disruption processes.