The paper reviews previous publications and reports some comments about a semi empirical model of the growth and decay process of a planktonic microbial culture. After summarizing and reshaping some fundamental mathem...The paper reviews previous publications and reports some comments about a semi empirical model of the growth and decay process of a planktonic microbial culture. After summarizing and reshaping some fundamental mathematical expressions, the paper highlights the reasons for the choice of a suitable time origin that makes the parameters of the model self-consistent. Besides the potential applications to predictive microbiology studies and to effects of bactericidal drugs, the model allows a suitable proxy of the fitness of the microbial culture, which can be of interest for the studies on the evolution across some thousand generations of a Long Term Evolution Experiment.展开更多
The so-called growth curve is of help to understand the underlying physiology of microbial cultures. A number of reported models describe the observed growth trends and the effects produced by the changes of the cultu...The so-called growth curve is of help to understand the underlying physiology of microbial cultures. A number of reported models describe the observed growth trends and the effects produced by the changes of the culture environment. However, the collected data (plate counts and/or Optical Density records) very often do not reliably comply with the number of fitting parameters of such models. An alternative semi empirical model describes the observed experimental trends of growth and decay of batch microbial cultures. Major advantages of the model include: reduced number and direct physical meaning of the best-fit parameters, easy comparison between different microbial cultures and/or different environment conditions for a given microbial strain. The experimental data (either plate counts or OD records) allow the estimation of the fitting parameters: that is why the model is substantially empirical and applies to any batch microbial culture. The present paper reports the formal details of the model and its extension to cases of environment changes occurred because of an exterior perturbation. The model seems adequate for predictive microbiology investigations, as well as for studies on the effects of bactericidal drugs.展开更多
文摘The paper reviews previous publications and reports some comments about a semi empirical model of the growth and decay process of a planktonic microbial culture. After summarizing and reshaping some fundamental mathematical expressions, the paper highlights the reasons for the choice of a suitable time origin that makes the parameters of the model self-consistent. Besides the potential applications to predictive microbiology studies and to effects of bactericidal drugs, the model allows a suitable proxy of the fitness of the microbial culture, which can be of interest for the studies on the evolution across some thousand generations of a Long Term Evolution Experiment.
文摘The so-called growth curve is of help to understand the underlying physiology of microbial cultures. A number of reported models describe the observed growth trends and the effects produced by the changes of the culture environment. However, the collected data (plate counts and/or Optical Density records) very often do not reliably comply with the number of fitting parameters of such models. An alternative semi empirical model describes the observed experimental trends of growth and decay of batch microbial cultures. Major advantages of the model include: reduced number and direct physical meaning of the best-fit parameters, easy comparison between different microbial cultures and/or different environment conditions for a given microbial strain. The experimental data (either plate counts or OD records) allow the estimation of the fitting parameters: that is why the model is substantially empirical and applies to any batch microbial culture. The present paper reports the formal details of the model and its extension to cases of environment changes occurred because of an exterior perturbation. The model seems adequate for predictive microbiology investigations, as well as for studies on the effects of bactericidal drugs.
