Assessment of the Performance of a Fed‐Batch Cultivation from the Preculture Quality Using an Electronic Nose

An electronic nose, a gas‐phase multisensor system, was used to monitor precultivations of a recombinant tryptophan‐producing Escherichia coli strain. The electronic nose signals showed a high correlation toward the main stages of the precultivations, namely, exponential growth, oxygen‐limited growth, and glucose depletion. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the electronic nose signals was performed and shown to be useful for monitoring preculture progression. More importantly, PCA also allowed a qualitative assessment of the preculture performance during subsequent fed‐batch cultivations. The electronic nose signals from the precultures showed, furthermore, a high correlation to the time of phosphate limitation and the tryptophan yield coefficient of the subsequent fed‐batch cultivations, which allowed an accurate prediction of these process variables using partial least squares (PLS). The results demonstrate on data from 12 cultivations how the electronic nose can be a useful tool for the assessment of inoculum quality, thereby providing means of reducing batch‐to‐batch variation and increasing the productivity of bioprocesses.