Nanostructured hybrid BioBots for beer brewing

Abstract

The brewing industry will amass a revenue above 500 billion euros in 2022, and the market is expected to grow annually. This industrial process is based on a slow sugar fermentation by yeast (commonly Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Herein, we encapsulate yeast cells into a biocompatible alginate (ALG) polymer along Fe3O4 nanoparticles to produce magneto/catalytic nanostructured ALG@yeast-Fe3O4 BioBots. Yeast encapsulated in these biocompatible BioBots keeps their biological activity (growth, reproduction, and catalytic fermentation) essential for brewing. Catalytic fermentation of sugars into CO2 gas caused a continuous oscillatory motion of the BioBots in the solution. This BioBot motion is employed to enhance the beer fermentation process compared to static-free yeast cells. When the process is finished, magnetic actuation of BioBots is employed for their retrieval from the beer samples, which avoids the need of additional filtration steps. All in all, we demonstrate how an industrial process such as beer production can be benefited by miniaturized autonomous magneto/catalytic BioBots.