Modelling and Computation for Micro-organisms in Bioprocesses

Course introduction

This course brings together contributions from different disciplines: bioprocess technology, applied physics, transport phenomena, molecular biology and biomedical sciences. They all address different elements on the coupling between several time and length scales in the simulation of different bioprocesses (e.g. bioreactor and bioprocess operation, microbial strain improvement, tissue and organ cultivation, plant design and integration). Computational methods will deepen the understanding of the connecting principles between different scales.

The idea of this course is to move from large-scale industrial bioprocesses (hectometers/days) down to the intracellular level (nanometers/microseconds), through several intermediate scales. These intermediate scales describe details inside the bioreactor (meters/hours) and in multicellular aggregates, as e.g. appearing in biofilms or tissues (millimeters/seconds). Top-down approaches allow answering particular questions in a natural way: a quantitative understanding at a higher level will – due to progressing insight or new requirements – be enhanced by details revealed by smaller scales approaches. A higher resolution description of the system will require a greater experimental effort to identify mechanisms and parameter values, together with considerably larger computational expenses. With the material presented in the course, the participants will better grasp the complexity of multileveled systems based on the underlying mechanisms. The increasing power of computational methods and hardware drastically reduces the need for simplification and thereby enhances the predictive capabilities of numerical models and our level of process understanding. This trend is expected to further develop at high pace.