Metabolic Mass Transfer in Monotonic Growth of Microorganisms

Abstract

Microorganism growth and reproduction have been traditionally modeled independently of the direct effect of the metabolic process. The latter caused inconsistencies between the modeling results and experimental data. A major inconsistency was linked to the experimentally observed lag phase in the growth process. Attempts to associate the lag phase to delay processes have been recently proven incorrect. The only other alternative is the existence of unstable stationary states resulting from the explicit inclusion of the metabolic mass transfer process via the resource consumption and utilization. The proposed theory that accounts for the latter is presented, analyzed, and compared with experimental data both qualitatively as well as quantitatively.