Validating shaking flasks as representative screening systems

The high information demand in biotechnical process development makes shaken bioreactors an essential tool for process development. By far most of all biotechnological experiments are carried out in shaken bioreactors. Nevertheless, the reaction conditions in these systems often are not representative of the following conditions of the technical scale. Therefore, results obtained in the screening system frequently can not be transferred to the production scale. This article describes a way to pragmatically scale down the technical scale to the screening system, to validate the screening system and finally to improve the validity of the generated data. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V.