In yeast research, the practicalities of monitoring culture flasks for fermentation progress manually (eg. 3 - 6 hourly for 4 - 14 days), means that experiments managed by a single researcher are quickly limited to around 20 flasks. We therefore developed an automated fermentation system to allow fast throughput of fermentation trials. The present facility largely eliminates the need for manual sampling of cultures by automated logging of weight loss due to CO₂ evolution from the fermentation of sugars.

Semi Automated System

• System consists of 20 high resolution balances (± 0.001 g), each with 4 flask capacity allowing 80 simultaneous fermentations (Fig. 1).
• Custom designed flasks are individually temperature controlled (± 0.5°C) and stirred.
• Fermentations are monitored frequently via weight loss (CO₂) in weigh cycle intervals as short as 5 minutes.
• Fermentation parameters are easily programmed and visualized by means of the graphic user interface (Fig. 2).
• Normalised data (g CO₂/100g media) can be exported to Excel for further data analysis.
• Decreased risk of contamination due to reduction of manual sampling.
• High replication of experiments is easily achieved with minimal error (Fig. 3).

Applications

• Evaluation of wine or brewing yeasts.
• Rapid evaluation of a large number of novel strains generated through procedure

  

  s such as strain hybridization or adaptive (directed) evolution.
• Evaluation of fermentation additives and treatments.
• Evaluation of other organisms where kinetic studies can be inferred by mass loss.
• High throughput screening studies of available laboratory yeast deletion and over-expression libraries.

Services offered can include experimental design, undertaking complete fermentation trials

(µL – kL scales), off-line analysis of fermentation samples, data analysis and generation of summary reports.

This facility is managed in partnership with  

Enquiries

Dr Frank Schmid

The University of Adelaide
Wine Innovation Cluster

Level 3 Central Building

PMB 1, GLEN OSMOND SA 5064
Australia
P +61 8 8313 0402
Fax +61 8 8303 7415