Question: What is an industrial microbiologist?

Helen Frost answered on 14 Jun 2017:

Well, let’s start with what’s a microbe first, and then we’ll get to the industrial part. This is going to be a long answer 🙂

Microbes are organisms which are too small to see with the naked eye, so we need to use a microscope to look at them. There are millions of different types of microbes, and many of them produce useful or interesting chemicals which we can use. The first time humans ever used microbes to our advantage was when some wild yeast accidentally fell into a mixture of flour and water, and started to produce carbon dioxide bubbles. These bubbles made the dough rise up and gave it a fluffy texture, and that’s what we now call bread. Yeast has also been used for thousands of years to produce another chemical: alcohol. Either using grapes as a starting point (to make wine) or grains (to make beer). Beer also has those bubbles of carbon dioxide, just like bread.

Different microbes produce other valuable products, like antibiotics for example.

So, and industrial microbiologist is a little bit like a farmer, but for microbes. They grow huge quantities of microbes and extract a valuable chemical from them. Just like a farmer plants a particular crop, feeds it, waters it, and then when it’s ready, harvests the fruit/grain/vegetable. Industrial microbiologists grow the microbes: make sure they have all the nutrients they need; keep the culture sterile so that no other microbes get in and contaminate it; then when the microbes are ready, they stimulate the production of the chemical they’re looking for, and collect it. These days, industrial microbiologists also genetically engineer microbes to change or improve the process.

Let me give you an example. There’s a big pharmaceutical company based here in Copenhagen called Novo Nordisk (I don’t work for them, but they’re very famous). Years ago, scientists at Novo wanted to find a solution to help people living with diabetes. Back then, insulin-dependent diabetics relied on insulin produced by animals (sheep or pigs, usually), which wasn’t a very good solution: the animals had to be killed to extract the insulin, it was expensive to rear them, and the insulin wasn’t exactly the same as human insulin so after a while their bodies started to reject this ‘foreign’ insulin. So, the Novo scientists took the human gene (the instructions for cells) for insulin and engineered a strain of bacteria called E. coli to contain this gene, so that the E. coli would produce insulin for them. Nowadays, production is done in huge fermentation containers (huge metal tanks) and in a very short space of time the bacteria produces huge quantities of ‘human’ insulin which can be purified and delivered to the patients who need it, at a much lower cost, and which is identical to human insulin, so there’s a much lower chance of rejection. It’s industrial microbiologists who make this whole thing happen.