Fig. 2

Representation of the three-stage separation scheme for intracellular products. The process streams and tasks are shown inside the boxes representing each stage. In stage I, the tasks of cell harvesting, cell disruption, and phase isolation are essential and must be performed in series, while pretreatment is optional and can be performed before cell harvesting or phase isolation tasks. The task in stage II is product concentration which may comprise single or multiple technologies. In stage III, purification and refinement tasks can be accomplished by either a single or combination of technology options based on the features of the input stream and final product specifications