Treatment of substituted phenol mixtures in single phase and two-phase solid iquid partitioning bioreactors

-The use of Two-phase Partitioning Bioreactors (TPPBs) is be an extremely effective means of biologically destroying xenobiotic substrates. In TPPBs, an organic phase is used to sequester toxic substrates, and to deliver them to the cells in the aqueous phase at sub-cytotoxic levels based on cellular demand and the maintenance of thermodynamic equilibrium between the two phases. In biotreatment systems, in which mixed populations of cells are necessarily used, the sequestering phase would need to be non-bioavailable to cells, however, in the case of immiscible liquid phases, this significantly limits the selection of the partitioning phase, as many/most organic solvents are to some extent biodegradable. Amorphous (soft) commercial polymers have been shown to function in exactly the same way as immiscible organic solvents in the delivery of toxic substrates to cells in TPPBs; advantageously, however, they are completely inert (non-bioavailable and completely biocompatible), have been shown to be effective for a wide range of toxic substrates of varying hydrophobicity (Daugulis et al. 2011), and are very inexpensive.