Potentiality of using microbial biosensors for the detection of substrate heterogeneities and the assessment of microbial viability in industrial bioreactors: a complete set of experiments in chemostat and scale-down reactors, and elaboration of a mini scale-down platform

Substrate limitation responsive biosensors have been used in order to detect spatial substrate heterogeneities, , inside industrial bioreactors (whole-cell biosensor). Three green fluorescent protein (GFP) transcriptional reporters have been chosen in E.coli, i.e. uspA::gfp, csiE::gfp and yciG::gfp. The promoter uspA is induced in response to a variety of stresses whereas the two other promoters, csiE and yciG, are supposed to be more specific in front of a substrate limitation.

The responsiveness of these biosensors has been assessed in chemostat reactor. Secondly, the same biosensors have been tested in well-mixed laboratory reactors and in scale-down reactors able to reproduce industrial conditions. Finally, a mini scale-down platform has been proposed as a high throughput tool to investigate rapidly the usefulness of a given microbial biosensor. Local heterogeneities in mini-bioreactor have caused a decrease of GFP expression, as in scale-down reactor. The presence of GFP in supernatants was noticed and this leakage seems to be correlated with the membrane permeability.