SEOUL, South Korea--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A research team at Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea developed a new alcoholic fermentation method using an electrospray cell patterning technology.
The electrospray is a generation method of tiny droplets by exposing liquid solutions to a high voltage electric field. John B. Fenn at Yale University, US (Nobel laureate in chemistry 2002) electrosprayed biological molecules and developed the electrospray mass spectrometry.
Konkuk University team (Principal Investigator: Prof. Byung Uk Lee) succeeded in electrospraying viable bacterial cells in 2008 (Journal of Aerosol Science, European Aerosol Assembly) and developed an electrospray cell patterning method at cellular resolution using the vibrational electrical field in 2010 and 2015 (Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology).
In 2019, they electrosprayed yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) cells and discovered that yeast cells patterned by this electrospraying method could conduct alcoholic fermentation performance with high speed rates.
Prof. Byung Uk Lee (PI, bioaerosol researcher) said that this finding shows a fundamental method for viable single cell analysis as well as alcoholic fermentation applications. He also mentioned that the 2008 discovery of electrospraying viable cells approaches practical applications.
These experimental results were published entitled ‘Electrospray patterning of yeast cells for applications in alcoholic fermentation’ at Scientific Reports (Nature Research) on December 9, 2019 and are freely available at the following link of the Nature Research’s website: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-55225-4
