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Mathematical modelling supports the existence of a threshold hydrogen concentration and media‑dependent yields in the growth of a reductive acetogen

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posted on 2023-05-03, 22:02 authored by Nick Smith, Paul ShortenPaul Shorten, Eric Altermann, Nicole Roy, Warren McNabb
The bacterial production of acetate via reductive acetogenesis along the Wood–Ljungdahl metabolic pathway is an important source of this molecule in several environments, ranging from industrial bioreactors to the human gastrointestinal tract. Here, we contributed to the study of reductive acetogens by considering mathematical modelling techniques for the prediction of bacterial growth and acetate production. We found that the incorporation of a hydrogen uptake concentration threshold into the models improves their predictions and we calculated this threshold as 86.2 mM (95% confidence interval 6.1–132.6 mM). Monod kinetics and first-order kinetics models, with the inclusion of two candidate threshold terms or reversible Michaelis–Menten kinetics, were compared to experimental data and the optimal formulation for predicting both growth and metabolism was found. The models were then used to compare the efficacy of two growth media for acetogens. We found that the recently described general acetogen medium was superior to the DSMZ medium in terms of unbiased estimation of acetogen growth and investigated the contribution of yeast extract concentration to acetate production and bacterial growth in culture. The models and their predictions will be useful to those studying both industrially and environmentally relevant reductive acetogenesis and allow for straightforward adaptation to similar cases with different organisms.

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© The Author(s) 2020 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Language

  • English

Does this contain Māori information or data?

  • No

Publisher

Springer Nature

Journal title

Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering

ISSN

1615-7591

Citation

Smith, N. W., Shorten, P. R., Altermann, E., Roy, N. C., & McNabb, W. C. (2020). Mathematical modelling supports the existence of a threshold hydrogen concentration and media‑dependent yields in the growth of a reductive acetogen. Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, 43, 885–894. doi:10.1007/s00449-020-02285-w

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