Lecture #9 – Biological Solutions to Process Design Problems

Note that engineering problems, based on how we’ve defined them, cannot be solved by a biological resolution because they were concerned with physico-chemical or thermodynamic aspects of the substrates/products. *There is one exception here. We might consider improvement of equilibrium reactions by coupling product removal to a second reaction to be a biological solution if we use a second enzyme. However, if we simply add a free enzyme, we haven’t really changed our initial catalyst, so our definition of a biological solution isn’t valid. It is valid if we alter a whole cell catalyst. Likewise, some biological problems cannot be resolved with an engineering solution. All biological problems, however, can potentially be addressed with biological solutions.