Module 8 - Microbial Biotechnology Flashcards
What term describes the use of biological processes or organisms for the production of goods?
Biotechnology
What are potential byproducts of microbial synthesis?
Food additives, solvents, enzymes, biofuels, agrochemicals, whole cells, fine chemicals
What are desirable products harvested from biotechnology?
Enzymes with a desired catalytic activity, or the degradation of an environmental contaminant
Obtaining microbes with characteristics that are useful or critical for specific biotechnology applications is defined as?
Bioprospecting
Any industrial process involving the culture of microorganisms, either aerobic or anaerobic, for the production of desired substances is termed?
Fermentation
Where do industrial fermentations take place?
Large-culture vessels called bioreactors
What do bioreactors maximize and yield?
Maximize cell density; yield product
What is controlled during the process of fermentation?
Environmental conditions
- Nutrients, oxygen, pH, and temperature
What are the two basic designs of bioreactors?
- Fed batch reactor
- Chemostat
Which bioreactor supports very high cell densities by providing the culture with a growth-limiting nutrient, such as a carbon source, over time?
Fed-batch reactor
Which process (Fed-batch or chemostat) controls the growth rate and can prevent the production of non-desired side products?
Fed-batch reactor
Which bioreactor is continuous and as an equivalent amount of culture is removed, a new medium is added?
Chemostat
What does a continuous addition of fresh medium control in a chemostat?
Growth rate and physiological steady state
What are the 4 phases of a growth curve?
- Lag phase
- Exponential phase
- Stationary phase
- Death phase
What two factors are varied and produced depending on the particular growth phase of a cell?
- Metabolic pathways
- Metabolites produced
How are two ways that beneficial genetic alterations (mutations) are generated in microbes?
- Random
- Site-directed
Exposure of cells to X-rays, or DNA-damaging chemicals that cause mutations in the DNA of a cell is known as which type of mutagenesis?
Random
When is random mutagenesis appropriate?
When a researcher may not know all the cellular processes that impact the phenotype they desire to affect
Example of random mutagenesis?
Penicillin production
Which type of mutagenesis allows researchers to make specific mutations at specific known sites with a DNA molecule?
Site-directed
Methods to modify genomes directly is a process called?
Genome editing
Two types of site-directed mutagenesis?
- PCR
- Oligonucleotide
Why would one need to do site-directed mutagenesis?
To study changes in protein activity that occur as a result of the DNA manipulation
What are specifically designed to produce recombinant proteins?
Expression vectors
Constructing novel biological systems from constituent parts is known as?
Synthetic biology
What are the steps to creating a synthetic organism?
- Entire microbial genome is synthesized
- Introduced into a cell
- Replicate
- Replaced into the preexisting host DNA
What constitutes a large portion of red biotech products that also constitute a substantial part of the pharmaceutical industry?
- Secondary metabolites
- Human proteins
Examples of red biotech therapeutics
- Type I interferons that treats for antitumor and antiviral properties
- Blood coagulation factor XIIIa that treats hemophilia
- Epidermal growth factor that treats burns and organ damage
The conversion of biomass, living or recently living biological substance into a number of products including chemicals, energy, and materials
Biorefinery
Fuels produced via biomass conversion is called?
Biofuels
Example of a biofuels
Ethanol
How is biofuel created?
In an ethanol still, heat is used to evaporate the ethanol from the fermented solution, which is then condensed around cooling coils and collected
What material is resistant to biodegradation and has detrimental effects on wildlife and ecosystems?
Bioplastics
What are factors that produce biofactors?
- Sun
- Transgenic plants: contain DNA from another type of organism
Term for a natural polyester?
PHB
Term for an assortment of polyesters?
PHAs
Short chain-length PHAs are made up of?
Carbon monomers with 3 to 5 carbon atoms
How do you achieve high levels of PHA?
Supply limiting amounts of nutrients such as phosphorus or nitrogen and simultaneously providing ample amounts carbon
Enzymes that originate from microbes are referred to as?
Biocatalysts
Why is vitamin and amino acid synthesis important?
These products have many uses in food, animal feed, and nutritional supplement industries
What is considered nature’s genetic engineer?
Agrobacterium
What is Agrobacterium required for the initiation of?
Tumors in dicot plants
What is the plasmid responsible for tumor formation?
pTi
- Tumor-inducing plasmid
