Figure 5
Effect of bulk pricing and composition on media costs. The cost of media reagents is broken down into carbon source, nitrogen source, salts and trace minerals, and supplements. Lab scale refers to small quantities of reagent grade material available from scientific suppliers (e.g. 500 g glucose from Fisher Scientific). Bulk scale refers to the largest available size of reagent grade material available from scientific suppliers (e.g. 50 kg glucose from Fisher Scientific). Commodity scale refers to substitutions of reagent grade materials with industrial commodity materials (e.g. reagent grade glucose replaced with industrial grade corn syrup). The size of each graph indicates the relative total cost of the medium, per L. As shown in the figure, large bulk discounts for glucose can greatly affect the overall cost of a medium, as indicated by a reduction in area for NBS medium and NBS fed batch medium at laboratory and bulk scale.