2026-0972507 - Purchase of a BioLector XT

1. The purchase concerns a BioLector XT microbioreactor system is intended for users associated with the Novo Nordisk Foundation C0₂ Research Center (CORC) and the Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering (BCE). The device allows running up to 48 cultures in parallel under controlled environmental conditions.

2. A strong component of the Research and CORC and BCE is the development of microbial cell factories and culture processes that can provide biosolutions to the urgent grand challenges of the society. Our early-stage R&D should generate reliable and scalable bioprocess data, ensuring results are relevant to larger-scale bioreactors, later to be demonstrated in AU Viborg. Therefore, the small-scale cultures must be carried out under well defined environmental conditions, monitoring parameters like dissolved oxygen, pH, and product fo1mation (usually linked to fluorescence markers of genes of interest). The unique capabilities of the BioLector to monitor several fluorescence, biomass, pH and dissolved oxygen in each individual well of a microtiter plate, make it a potent tool to assist our microbial strain screening and design, as well as culture media and fetmentation development under defined conditions and culture schemes sinular to those of industrial applications.

3. The BioLector is a unique instrument in the market. It is the only instrument that gives the combination of high oxygen transfer, real-time monitoring, and parallel microbioreactor capability, which is 11ecessa1y for scalable bioprocess development. The capacity of manipulating gas composition allows experiments under controlled and defined oxygen availability. Without these capabilities, the research would produce less reliable and non-scalable data, which cannot support further process development at larger scale. The high accuracy and scalability of results from the BioLector cannot be achieved by conventional plate readers 4. There are no comparable products in the market. A wide search on a variety of websites was carried out and only plate readers were found. Such systems only measure fluorescence and optical density, and their shaking capabilities are usually low. In contrast, the plates used in the BioLector have an especial geometty that, in combination with the high shaking frequency, allow reaching oxygen transfer rates comparable to those of stirred tank bioreactors. Moreover, conventional plate readers cannot measure neither the dissolved oxygen nor the pH, which is essential for understanding the culture performance. This, together with the possibility of manipulating the gas composition in the headspace, make it a unique system with virtually no sinular devices in the market.