Kinetics of phenol oxidation by washed cells

The uptake of phenol by pure cultures of Pseudomonas putida growing on phenol in continuous culture has been studied. The purpose of the experiments was to determine the kinetic parameters governing uptake of phenol by organisms growing on phenol in the high‐conversion range by measuring uptake rates per unit biomass per unit time at various phenol concentrations. The microorganisms used were taken from a chemostat at residence times of 8, 5.25, 3.85, 3.2, 3, and 2.7h. The Monod–Haldane model and modifications of it were applied to the data and the best kinetic parameters were determined by nonlinear least‐squares techniques. The best model was a two‐parameters simplification of Monod–Haldane in which μ = K1S/(K2 + S2). The value of K1 was found to increase monotonically with the value of phenol concentration in the original chemostat with an apparent induction “threshold” of 0.1 mg/L.