Industrial and Pharmaceutical Microbiology

Sterility and Asepsis

In the microbiology laboratory, sterility is a most important consideration and ways of achieving it form the earliest portions of the training of a microbiologist. In the industrial fermentation  contamination by unwanted organisms could pose serious problems because of the vastly increased scale of the operation in comparison with laboratory work. If Pediococus streptococcus damnosus which causes sourness in beer were to contaminate the fermentation tanks of a brewery then hundreds of thousands of liters of beer may have to be discarded, with consequent loss in revenue to the brewery. The situation would be similar if a penicillianase-producing Bacillus sps. were to contaminate a penicillin  fermentation, or lytic phages an acetone-butanol mash.