Antibiotic Production by Membrane Operations

There is no abstract, this is an excerpt from the content: Antibiotics are medicines produced by fermentation that fight bacterial infections; they can either kill other microorganisms or inhibit their growth. The development of antibiotics started with the discovery of penicillin by Fleming in 1928 that gave rise to many other discoveries in the subsequent 40 years. The number of new antibiotics on the market had a steady increase until the 1980s, but the unrestrained use of antibiotics led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and the number of approved antibiotics decreased constantly in the last 30 years (Coates et al. 2011). The research for therapeutics endowed with a broaden antimicrobial range brought to the development of semisynthetic antibiotics which are produced by chemical or enzymatic transformation of penicillin and cephalosporins (Srirangan et al. 2013). Penicillin is still one of the antibiotics with the largest annual bulk production; it is part of the β-lactam antibiotic ...