New patterns of mixed-substrate utilization during batch growth of Escherichia coli K12.

Microbial growth on mixtures of substrates is of considerable engineering and biological interest. Most of the work until now has dealt with microbial growth on binary mixtures of sugars or polyols. In these cases, it is often found that no matter how the inoculum is precultured, only one of the two substrates is consumed in the first growth phase, leading to the diauxic growth pattern. The goal of the experiments reported here is to investigate growth on mixtures containing at least one organic acid. These experiments show that the substrate utilization patterns in such mixtures are qualitatively different from the diauxic growth pattern. For instance, during growth of Escherichia coli K12 on certain binary mixtures of organic acids, the two substrates are utilized simultaneously, and the mixed-substrate maximum specific growth rate exceeds the single-substrate maximum specific growth rate on either one of the two constituent substrates. Furthermore, the very same mixed-substrate maximum specific growth and substrate uptake rates are observed no matter how the inoculum is precultured. On the other hand, in a mixture of glucose and pyruvate, the maximum specific growth rate seems to depend on the preculturing conditions, thus suggesting the existence of multiple physiological quasi-steady states. (c) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Biotechnol Bioeng 55: 747-757, 1997.