Scale‐up/Scale‐down of microbial bioprocesses: a modern light on an old issue

The bio‐economy is in transit from innovation to commercialization. The bioprocess industry is expected to increasingly deliver bio‐products to the market, in large amounts, at high quality and at competitive cost levels. This requires flawless start‐up of new large‐scale bioprocesses and continuous improvement of running processes. Fermentation scale‐up and operation can benefit from recent advances in three areas: 1. computation‐driven design of scale‐down simulators, 2. omics‐driven metabolic engineering and 3. sensing and understanding of population heterogeneity. Integration of these fields requires a unified computational approach, linked to big data and simulated reality frameworks, of which the contours are becoming visible today.