Within the European project Purple4Life, our team at the University of Antwerp is exploring how purple phototrophic bacteria can contribute to more sustainable and circular bioprocesses. These metabolically versatile microorganisms have strong potential as...
Purple4Life - Innovative, sustainable, and circular production of purple phototrophic bacteria as a health-promoting ingredient for food and feed applications. The European project Purple4Life has been selected for funding under the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint...
UMONS is developing a scalable bag culture system to grow purple bacteria, converting agri-food by-products into protein, CoQ10, and carotenoid-rich biomass. This bridges lab-scale to pilot-scale production, supplying partners for aquaculture feed trials and human dietary supplementation studies.
UMONS has now moved into the scale-up/fine tuning phase and has begun producing biomass to supply the different project partners for their respective downstream applications, including aquaculture feeding trials and studies targeting human dietary supplementation. To meet the growing volume requirements, the UMONS team is developing a bag culture system as a scalable, cost-effective production platform.
This approach allows for larger culture volumes under controlled light and anaerobic conditions, while remaining flexible enough to optimize growth parameters as production scales up toward pilot level.
The transition toward sustainable, circular and healthy food systems demands novel, resource-efficient ingredients that can replace synthetic additives while delivering genuine nutritional and functional benefits. Purple bacteria are uniquely positioned in this space: they can convert agri-food by-products into biomass rich in high-quality protein, CoQ10, and natural carotenoids, all compounds with strong antioxidant properties and health-promoting effect to both human and animal.
However, one of the greatest challenges in microbial biotechnology is bridging the gap between promising laboratory results and reliable production at larger scales. Growing purple bacteria in small, carefully controlled flasks is fundamentally different from producing large, and one industrial, quantities of biomass. As culture volumes increase, maintaining optimal and uniform light exposure becomes increasingly difficult, since light penetration decreases with culture depth and density. Temperature regulation, mixing efficiency, and the prevention of contamination also grow significantly more complex at larger scales.
The bag culture system being developed at UMONS is designed to address these scale-up challenges. By offering a controlled, modular, and progressively scalable production format, it serves as an essential intermediate step between laboratory bottles and full pilot-scale setup, helping to ensure that biomass quality and bioactive yields are maintained as production volumes increase. Successfully overcoming this scale-up barrier is a prerequisite for all downstream activities in the project, from safety testing to feeding trials and nutritional studies.
As project coordinator and leader in PNSB strain optimization and biomass production, the main objective of the ProtMic team of UMONS in this phase is to team up with our colleague of URJC in Spain to reliably produce and deliver high-quality purple bacteria biomass to our consortium partners, ensuring that the bioactive content remains consistent across production batches and meets the requirements for both feed formulation and human consumption studies. This biomass supply is the essential link connecting upstream strain science to downstream application testing across the project.
With biomass production underway, the next steps involve validating the stability of key bioactive compounds, particularly CoQ10, throughout the production and processing chain. In parallel, the bag culture system will be further optimized to increase productivity and installed volumes as the project moves toward pilot-scale operation within the first two years. The produced biomass will be delivered to Nofima and Fraunhofer IMTE for incorporation into salmonid feed trials, to CNR for allergenicity and safety assessment, and to UPO, UNIBA and UCLouvain, partners investigating CoQ10 supplementation for human health applications.