Team:ETH Zurich/Modeling/Chemostat Selection

Chemostat Selection

As mentioned in the project overview page, one of the main concepts in our project is the possibility to select for organisms with reduced genome size. To achieve this we have thought of letting our system develop in a continuous environment with nucleotide limitation and base the selection method on the difference in growthrate. The aim of this model is to show the applicability of this concept and to determine the parameters for the operation of the chemostat in the lab.

We give a short introduction to continuoous cultures and proceed to develop the used model.

Cemostat basics

A chemostat allows for continuous fermentation in a constant volume. It consists of a culture vessel with an input aperture for sterile medium and an overflow aperture to mantain the volume constant. This allows to mantain a constant population in the chemostat but still have continuous cell division.

By varying parameters like the dilution rate (D) and the concentration of nutrients in the medium, different steady states can be obtained, thus allowing to fine tune the selection process. In our case, the feed rate can be set externally and cell growth is limited by a selected nutrient (in our case nucleotides).

The specific growth rate in the chemostat can be determined by the material mass balances of biomass and substrate.

The equation for biomass is given by: , and the substrate equation by:

Competition in the chemostat

Pulse