Automated growth rate determination in high-throughput microbioreactor systems.

A MATLAB code is presented that detects the exponential growth phase from multiple microbial cultivations in an iterative procedure based on several criteria, according to the model of exponential growth. These were obtained with Corynebacterium glutamicum showing single exponential growth phase and Escherichia coli exhibiting diauxic growth with exponential phase followed by retarded growth. The procedure reproducibly detects the correct biomass data subset for growth rate calculation. The procedure was applied on data set detached from growth phenotyping of library of genome reduced C. glutamicum strains and results agree with previously reported results where manual effort was needed to pre-process the data. Thus, the automated and standardized method enables a fair comparison of strain mutants for biological fitness evaluation. The code is easily parallelized and greatly facilitates experimental throughout in biological fitness testing from strain screenings conducted with MBR systems.