I am reading a recent paper on newly discovered bacteria in sponge T.Swinhoei. This paper suggests using large scale cultivation to obtain enough supply of these bacteria.
I would suggest reading the articles by Dr. Paul Bishop whose expertise is on bioreactors.
Do you want to know how large is large? For autotrophic bacteria growing on H2 a cultivation in a 500L bioreactor is really large.
Depends on the scale of the process have to work in the area of vaccines , prostaglandins, other drugs , the scale of production per year is 100 l , but if yeast for the baking industry is produced on an industrial scale is 10 to 100 m3 , specialty chemicals average industrial scale is 20000 L , as you will see depends on what you're going to be processed.
Completelly agereeing with the previous answers, here are some short remarks:
As I worked in industry and in R+D as well, I saw many different examples. The "large", "pilot" or "laboratory scale" terms are highly dependent of the scircustances and products. Remaining at the industrial, aerobic and monoseptic fermentation in aerated, mixed steril tanks (fermenters), the largest usable size was 500 m3. You should think about products like amino acids for feed except tryptophane, glutamic acid or citric acid - which are bulk, relatively cheap products.
In case of high value pharmaceutical products like insulin (by using E.coli) the 5-10 m3 is already fairly big.
In the same time this 5-10 m3 scale counts as pilot for usual biological waste water treatment which is also a kind of fermentation nevertheless it is open and therefore not sterile process. In this case the large scale starts at 5000 m3.
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