Integration of whole-cell reaction and product isolation: Highly hydrophobic solvents promote in situ substrate supply and simplify extractive product isolation.

Product isolation from aqueous-organic reaction mixtures that contain high concentrations of whole cells constitutes a challenging task in bioprocessing. Stirring of the biphasic reaction media leads to the formation of solvent droplets coated by cells and other surface active components and an emulsion forms. We used an early focus on phase separation to simplify a whole-cell bioreduction.

CCD saturation in high-background environments.

Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are nowadays preferred X-ray detectors in environments with high-background radiation. The maximum number of X-ray counts per exposure in a CCD-detector is limited by saturation. The simulation of this effect reproduces well the measurements with a 55Fe source.