3rd day (25th November 2011)

3^rd day – cleaning up our mess!!

Well, here we are back to the lab 148 again.

:) Luckily today is the last day as we are going to clean up our bioreactor!!  After obtaining the last 2 results (8am and 10am), here comes the star, Mr. Shaman!!

First and foremost, he checked through all the bioreactors to make sure they were still in good conditions. However, some of the bioreactor seemed not that 'well', such as our group. ><  

Anyway, Mr. Shaman claimed that that should be okay if we were to increase the air flow rate. Therefore we increased it from 1vvm to 1.5vvm.

Later, here comes Mr. Shaman again to give us another brief presentation again regarding the large scale bioreactor models. In the presentation (a video actually), it showed how the people in the Ipoh Veterinary Center handle a 30 liter bioreactor. Due to the quality of the video was not that good; we couldn't really see the bioreactor clearly. However, with Mr. Shaman’s explanation, we were able to catch up with the content of the video.

After finishing the video, finally was the time for us to end everything. The yeasts were going breath for their last time. (In fact the yeasts in our group already dead as the graph indicates that there were no more glucose in the medium and no oxygen uptake.) Well, just rest in peace my dear yeasts.

After we switched off the main switch, everything stops. The impellers stop moving, the sparger stop functioning and everything else stops. We carefully extract the last sample required and take it for analysis. We did the procedure of cleaning as below:

1.       Switched off all the functions on the control panel.

2.       Switched off the main switch.

3.       Stopped the pump.

4.       Removed the tube and pipe connected to the headplate.

5.       Removed the antifoam bottle and the alkaline bottle.

6.       Removed the pH probe as well as the O₂ probe.

7.       Unscrewed the headplate and poured away the medium. (goodbye Saccharomyces cerevisiae~~~)

8.       Washed the vessel and the holding part of it as well.

9.       Kept the vessel and the headplate on the table and let it dry.

10.   Incubated the filters and the outlet gas pipes at 70°C.

Sebastian removing the sparger 

Rozi carefully move the vessel containing medium

Pouring the medium 

Hoho...washing done !

 Here we let them dry : )

 After the cleaning part, a big surprise for us!! A 15 liter bioreactor was right in front of us. It was quite bulky if compared to the nice and cute little mini forz that we were using. 

Here comes our ''star of the day'' !

Dr. Shaman explained to us patiently each part of the bioreactor and the usage of it.

Everyone paid full attention

 A 15 liter bioreactor basically has all the features similar to a mini bioreactor, other than they have a trolley of its own. Some of us did rise up a few questions after the briefing of the bioreactor. It was a fruitful interaction session!

Well, that’s basically the end of our final day. We really appreciate that Mr. Shaman who spent the past 3 days with us teaching us the new knowledges and allowed us to have some hands on experience on the bioreactor.

(FYI: pity group 4 as they still need to keep their bioreactor on to see how far that their Saccharomyces cerevisiaecan go on. XD)