Exploring the Single-Cell to Understand the BioreActor – SCUBA

The SCUBA project is dedicated to harnessing the potential of bioreactors as a linchpin in achieving sustainable solutions for a circular economy. Bioreactors are essentially multiphase systems and the mass transfer between phases necessarily plays a central role in the definition of the internal bioreaction rates. The interfacial mass-transfer rate, also named uptake rate in microbiology, serves as an input for all bioreaction models including chemically structured and metabolic models and provides upper bounds for the biotransformation rates. Microbial cells travelling in large scale bioreactors face fluctuating conditions (pH, temperature, nutrients, oxygen) with adverse effects on global productivity due to increased maintenance and metabolic disorders. The SCUBA project aims to fill the gap between the single-cell and the bioreactor scales by providing an innovative and unique tool for single-cell analysis relying on bioprocess simulation needs. To do so, we ambition to feed bioreactor predictive models with the quantification of mass transfer fluxes between the cell and its local environment as well as describing the cell division/morphology in real-time – when exposed to a fluctuation - using relevant biological model.