Abstract
This paper proposes a microbe culture system in an open environment using hydrogel micro tubes. Oil production microbes, such as Aurantiochytrium, have been discovered to produce fuels instead of fossil fuels. Biomass production by microbes is promising, where scale-up, competition against other microbes and collection of the products are the major challenges. Here, we propose to use hydrogel micro tubes to encapsulate, protect, and culture microbes. The tubes can be micro- and mass-fabricated. They prevent competitive microbes from intruding inside while they allow oxygen and nutrition to permeate through. The byproducts can be collected together with the tubes. In this paper, we demonstrate the proof-of-concepts experiments: we fabricated hydrogel micro tubes and cultured lactic acid producing microbes inside the tubes. The microbes were protected and increased inside the tubes even when competitive microbes existed in the culture media. Their byproducts were successfully collected with the micro tubes.
