Where the fermentation
community gathers.

Preculture strategies and shake flask scalability in microbial and mammalian systems.

Scaling fermentation of skincare and flavor molecules from early screening to 100 m³ production requires more than maximizing lab-scale titers.

When the medium, the feed or the scale changes, the size and physiology of the cells change, and so does what an optical density reading means. Drawing on challenges seen in the field, this talk explores how cells/mL and cell size can help carry the induction point, the feed after induction and soluble expression from shake flask to bioreactor.

The underlying scale-up problem: kLa is one of the few parameters that does not scale linearly between bench, pilot, and production scale — it depends on power input per volume (P/V), superficial gas velocity, vessel geometry, impeller type, and sparger design. Reliable process scale-up therefore requires knowing how kLa behaves across multiple scales and operating settings. In practice this rarely happens systematically, because the classical method (manual static gassing-out) is too labor-intensive to repeat at the scale required — which is exactly the gap the automated kLa determination application closes.