Neuroscience and Psychiatry: Open Access

Microbial Growth Kinetics Innovations

 Microbial growth kinetics, i.e., the relationship between the specific growth rate (μ) of a microbial population and the substrate concentration (s), is an indispensable tool in all fields of microbiology, be it physiology, genetics, ecology, or biotechnology, and thus it's a crucial a part of the essential teaching of microbiology. Unfortunately, the principles and definitions of growth kinetics are frequently presented as if they were firmly established in the 1940s and during the following “golden age” in the 1950s and 1960s (the key publications are those of Monod, Hinshelwood, van Niel , Novick and Szilard , Herbert et al , Málek , Pfenning and Jannasch, Fencl , Pirt, Powell et al., and Tempest, culminating in the book by Pirt). This state of affairs is probably the consequence of a stagnation in this area during the past three decades, in which the interest of many microbiologists was attracted by rapidly developing areas like genetics or the biochemistry of the degradation of xenobiotics. However, it might also be the consequence of certain frustration from the many attempts that had been made to obtain coherent experimental data. This state is also reflected by the fact that only a few review articles and one monograph that primarily deal with growth kinetics per se and its problems were published within the last two decades. In contrast, considerable attention has been paid to the modeling aspects of both growth and substrate removal (biodegradation) kinetics.  

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