Advances in Catalytic Biofilms

A special issue of Bioengineering (ISSN 2306-5354).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2017) | Viewed by 6448

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department Solar Materials, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
Interests: product driven biocatalysis; continuous bioprocesses; biofilm cultivation; bioprospecting; biofilm regulation; biofilm characterization

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Biofilms represent a microbial catalyst format, which, in principle, exhibits an infinite turn-over number (TN) due to the fact that they are constituted of naturally immobilized cells continuously regenerating themselves. Their natural, intrinsic ability of tolerating different kind of stresses, natural (desiccation, starvation, predators) or process related (toxic compounds, pH shifts, high salt) make biofilms an ideal system for continuous bioprocess development.

However, although widely accepted as a potent alternative to planktonically growing cell cultures, there are still a number of challenges to be addressed. Developing novel reactor concepts, technical solutions for mass transfer limitations, highly diluted bleed streams and low specific activities are as important as designing novel biofilm catalysts and understanding biofilm regulation and development.

Additionally, new developments as multispecies biofilms, multistep catalysis and activities in the bio electrochemical field are highly exciting and open up new areas in biofilm research.

In this Special Issue we would like to give an overview of the latest advances in the field of product driven biofilm research, spanning the area of basic to applied biofilm studies. We look forward to receiving your contributions to these cutting edge issues.

Prof. Dr. Katja Buehler
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Biocatalysis
  • Continuous bioprocess
  • Biofilm reactors
  • Biofilm reaction concepts
  • Multi-species biofilms
  • Genetic engineering
  • Biofilm regulation (C-di-GMP/RpoS)
  • Modelling

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

29 pages, 8686 KiB  
Article
Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column
by George E. Kapellos, Christakis A. Paraskeva, Nicolas Kalogerakis and Patrick S. Doyle
Bioengineering 2018, 5(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering5010015 - 12 Feb 2018
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 5985
Abstract
In the aftermath of oil spills in the sea, clouds of droplets drift into the seawater column and are carried away by sea currents. The fate of the drifting droplets is determined by natural attenuation processes, mainly dissolution into the seawater and biodegradation [...] Read more.
In the aftermath of oil spills in the sea, clouds of droplets drift into the seawater column and are carried away by sea currents. The fate of the drifting droplets is determined by natural attenuation processes, mainly dissolution into the seawater and biodegradation by oil-degrading microbial communities. Specifically, microbes have developed three fundamental strategies for accessing and assimilating oily substrates. Depending on their affinity for the oily phase and ability to proliferate in multicellular structures, microbes might either attach to the oil surface and directly uptake compounds from the oily phase, or grow suspended in the aqueous phase consuming solubilized oil, or form three-dimensional biofilms over the oil–water interface. In this work, a compound particle model that accounts for all three microbial strategies is developed for the biodegradation of solitary oil microdroplets moving through a water column. Under a set of educated hypotheses, the hydrodynamics and solute transport problems are amenable to analytical solutions and a closed-form correlation is established for the overall dissolution rate as a function of the Thiele modulus, the Biot number and other key parameters. Moreover, two coupled ordinary differential equations are formulated for the evolution of the particle size and used to investigate the impact of the dissolution and biodegradation processes on the droplet shrinking rate. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Catalytic Biofilms)
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