Yeast cells are important host systems for the industrial production of bioproducts, like proteins, enzymes, and nanoplexes. These products are, in many cases, accumulated in the intracellular space. Product release is usually performed by mechanical cell-disruption methods, which are lacking specificity. Thus, a range of impurities and proteases are liberated with the sought material. This situation negatively affects the purification operations downstream and compromise product integrity. Attempts have been made to implement non-mechanical, selective methods for cell permeabilization and product release. Among them, the application of an electric field - under optimized conditions - can be proposed as a gentle "electroextraction" of intracellular products. Extraction by electrical fields can be performed either in batch or in continuous mode, adding flexibility to the technique. In this article, we describe the concepts behind this novel method in the frame provided by standard biomass-disruption operations.
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