CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION:
SCOPE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY
AND INDUSTRIAL
MICROBIOLOGY
NATURE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRIAL
MICROBIOLOGY
Biotechnology is defined as “any technological application that
uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives
thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific
use.”
Many examples readily come to mind of living things being used
to make or modify processes for specific use.
Some of these include the use of microorganisms to make the
antibiotic, penicillin or the dairy product, yoghurt; the use of
microorganisms to produce amino acids or enzymes are also
examples of biotechnology.
NATURE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRIAL
MICROBIOLOGY
Developments in molecular biology in the last two decades or
so, have vastly increased our understanding of the nucleic
acids in the genetic processes.
This has led to applications of biological manipulation at the
molecular level in such technologies as genetic engineering.
All aspects of biological manipulations now have molecular
biology dimensions and it appears convenient to divide
biotechnology into traditional biotechnology which does not
directly involve nucleic acid or molecular manipulations and
nucleic acid biotechnology, which does.
NATURE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRIAL
MICROBIOLOGY
Industrial microbiology may be defined as the study of the
large-scale and profit motivated production of microorganisms
or their products for direct use, or as inputs in the
manufacture of other goods.
Thus yeasts may be produced for direct consumption as food
for humans or as animal feed, or for use in bread-making; their
product, ethanol, may also be consumed in the form of
alcoholic beverages, or used in the manufacture of perfumes,
pharmaceuticals, etc.
Industrial microbiology is clearly a branch of biotechnology and
includes the traditional and nucleic acid aspects.
CHARACTERISTICS OF INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY
The discipline of microbiology is often divided into sub-
disciplines such as medical microbiology, environmental
microbiology, food microbiology and industrial microbiology.
The boundaries between these sub-divisions are often blurred
and are made only for convenience.
Industrial vs Medical Microbiology
The sub-disciplines of industrial microbiology and medical
microbiology differ in at least three different ways.
First is the immediate motivation: in industrial microbiology
the immediate motivation is profit and the generation of
wealth.
In medical microbiology, the immediate concern of the
microbiologist or laboratory worker is to offer expert opinion
to the doctor about, for example the spectrum of antibiotic
susceptibility of the microorganisms isolated from a diseased
condition so as to restore the patient back to good health.
The generation of wealth is of course at the back of the mind
of the medical microbiologist but restoration of the patient to
good health is the immediate concern.
Industrial vs Medical Microbiology
The second difference is that the microorganisms per se used
in routine medical microbiology have little or no direct
economic value.
In industrial microbiology the microorganisms involved or their
products are very valuable.
Industrial vs Medical Microbiology
The third difference between the two sub-disciplines is the
scale at which the microorganisms are handled.
In industrial microbiology, the scale is large and the organisms
may be cultivated in fermentors as large as 50,000 liters or
larger.
In routine medical microbiology the scale at which the
pathogen is handled is limited to a loopful or a few milliliters.
If a pathogen which normally would have no economic value
were to be handled on the large scale used in industrial
microbiology, it would most probably be to prepare a vaccine
against the pathogen.
Under that condition, the pathogen would then acquire an
economic value and a profit-making potential; the operation
would properly be termed industrial microbiology.
Multi-disciplinary or Team-work Nature of
Industrial Microbiology
Unlike many other areas of the discipline of microbiology, the
microbiologist in an industrial establishment does not function
by himself.
He is usually only one of a number of different functionaries
with whom he has to interact constantly.
In a modern industrial microbiology organization these others
may include chemical or production engineers, biochemists,
economists, lawyers, marketing experts, and other high-level
functionaries.
They all cooperate to achieve the purpose of the firm, which is
not philanthropy, (at least not immediately) but the generation
of profit or wealth.
Multi-disciplinary or Team-work Nature of
Industrial Microbiology
Despite the necessity for team work emphasized above, the
microbiologist has a central and key role in his organization. Some of
his functions include:
a. the selection of the organism to be used in the processes;
b. the choice of the medium of growth of the organism;
c. the determination of the environmental conditions for the organism’s
optimum productivity i.e., pH, temperature, aeration, etc.
d. during the actual production the microbiologist must monitor the
process for the absence of contaminants, and participate in quality
control to ensure uniformity of quality in the products;
e. the proper custody of the organisms usually in a culture collection, so
that their desirable properties are retained;
f. the improvement of the performance of the microorganisms by
genetic manipulation or by medium reconstitution.
Obsolescence in Industrial Microbiology
As profit is the motivating factor in the pursuit of industrial microbiology,
less efficient methods are discarded as better ones are discovered.
Indeed a microbiological method may be discarded entirely in favor of a
cheaper chemical method.
This was the case with ethanol for example which up till about 1930 was
produced by fermentation.
When cheaper chemical methods using petroleum as the substrate
became available in about 1930, fermentation ethanol was virtually
abandoned.
From the mid-1970s the price of petroleum has climbed steeply.
It has once again become profitable to produce ethanol by fermentation.
Several countries notably Brazil, India and the United States have
officially announced the production of ethanol by fermentation for
blending into gasoline as gasohol.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
All over the world, governments set up patent or intellectual
property laws, which have two aims.
First, they are intended to induce an inventor to disclose
something of his/her invention.
Second, patents ensure that an invention is not exploited without
some reward to the inventor for his/her innovation; anyone wishing
to use a patented invention would have to pay the patentee for its
use.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
For most patent laws an invention is patentable:
a. if it is new, results from inventive activity and is capable of
industrial application, or
b. if it constitutes an improvement upon a patented invention, and is
capable of industrial application.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
For the purposes of the above:
a. an invention is new if it does not form part of the state of the art
(i.e., it is not part of the existing body of knowledge);
b. an invention results from inventive activity if it does not obviously
follow from the state of the art, either as to the method, the
application, the combination of methods, or the product which is
concerns, or as to the industrial result it produces, and
c. an invention is capable of industrial application if it can be
manufactured or used in any kind of industry, including agriculture.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
In the above, ‘the art’ means the art or field of knowledge to
which an invention relates and ‘the state of the art’ means
everything concerning that art or field of knowledge which has
been made available to the public anywhere and at any time, by
means of a written or oral description, or in any other way, before
the date of the filing of the patent application.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
Patents cannot be validly obtained in respect of:
a. plant or animal varieties, or essentially biological processes for the
production of plants or animals (other than microbiological processes
and their products), or
b. inventions, the publication or exploitation of which would be
contrary to public order or morality.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
It is however not always as easy as it may seem to show that an
invention is ‘new’, ‘useful’, and ‘unobvious’.
In some cases it has been necessary to go to the law courts to
decide whether or not an invention is patentable.
It is therefore advisable to obtain the services of an attorney
specializing in patent law before undertaking to seek a patent.
The laws are often so complicated that the layman, including the
bench-bound microbiologist may, without proper guidance, leave
out essential details which may invalidate his claim to his
invention.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
A wide range of microbiological inventions are generally recognized
as patentable.
Such items include vaccines, bacterial insecticides, and
mycoherbicides.
As will be seen below however, micro-organisms per se are not
patentable, except when they are used as part of a ‘useful’
process.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
On 16 June, 1980 a case of immense importance to the course of
industrial microbiology was decided in the United States Court of
Customs and Patent Appeals.
In brief, the court ruled that “a live human-made micro-organism is
patentable”.
Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty then an employee of General Electric Company
had introduced into a bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas two plasmids
which enabled the new bacterium to degrade multiple components of
crude oil.
This single bacterium rather than a mixture of several would then be
used for cleaning up oil spills.
Claims to the invention were on three grounds.
a. Process claims for the method of producing the bacteria
b. Claims for an inoculum comprising an inert carrier and the bacterium
c. Claims to the bacteria themselves.
PATENTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
The first two were easily accepted by the lower court but the third
was not accepted on the grounds that
(i) the organisms are products of nature and
(ii) that as living things they are not patentable.
As had been said earlier the Appeals Court reversed the earlier
judgment of the lower court and established the patentability of
organisms imbued with new properties through genetic
engineering.
THE USE OF THE WORD ‘FERMENTATION’ IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY
The first meaning relates to microbial physiology.
In strict physiological terms, fermentation is defined in
microbiology as the type of metabolism of a carbon source in which
energy is generated by substrate level phosphorylation and in
which organic molecules function as the final electron acceptor (or
as acceptors of the reducing equivalents) generated during the
break-down of carbon-containing compounds or catabolism.
As is well-known, when the final acceptor is an inorganic
compound the process is called respiration.
Respiration is referred to as aerobic if the final acceptor is oxygen
and anaerobic when it is some other inorganic compound outside
oxygen e.g sulphate or nitrate.
THE USE OF THE WORD ‘FERMENTATION’ IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY
The second usage of the word is in industrial microbiology, where
the term ‘fermentation’ is any process in which micro-organisms
are grown on a large scale, even if the final electron acceptor is
not an organic compound (i.e. even if the growth is carried out
under aerobic conditions).
Thus, the production of penicillin, and the growth of yeast cells
which are both highly aerobic, and the production of ethanol or
alcoholic beverages which are fermentations in the physiological
sense, are all referred to as fermentations.
THE USE OF THE WORD ‘FERMENTATION’ IN
INDUSTRIAL MICROBIOLOGY
The third usage concerns food. A fermented food is one, the
processing of which micro organisms play a major part.
Microorganisms determine the nature of the food through
producing the flavor components as well deciding the general
character of the food, but microorganisms form only a small
portion of the finished product by weight.
Foods such as cheese, bread, and yoghurt are fermented foods.
ORGANIZATIONAL SET-UP IN AN INDUSTRIAL
MICROBIOLOGY ESTABLISHMENT
The culture usually comes from the firm’s culture collection but may
have been sourced originally from a public culture collection and linked
to a patent.
On the other hand it may have been isolated ab initio by the firm from
soil, the air, the sea, or some other natural body.
The nutrients which go into the medium are compounded from various
raw materials, sometimes after appropriate preparation or modification
including saccharification as in the case of complex carbohydrates such as
starch or cellulose.
An inoculum is first prepared usually from a lyophilized vial whose purity
must be checked on an agar plate.
The organism is then grown in shake flasks of increasing volumes until
about 10% of the volume of the pilot fermentor is attained.
It is then introduced into pilot fermentor(s) before final transfer into the
production fermentor(s).
ORGANIZATIONAL SET-UP IN AN INDUSTRIAL
MICROBIOLOGY ESTABLISHMENT
The extraction of the material depends on what the end product is.
The methods are obviously different depending on whether the organism
itself, or its metabolic product is the desired commodity.
If the product is the required material the procedure will be dictated by
its chemical nature.
Quality control must be carried out regularly to ensure that the right
material is being produced.
Sterility is important in industrial microbiology processes and is
maintained by various means, including the use of steam, filtration or by
chemicals.
Air, water, and steam and other services must be supplied and
appropriately treated before use.
The wastes generated in the industrial processes must also be disposed
off.