Steady-state culture characteristics are usually determined in chemostat cultivations, which are very time-consuming. In contrast, acceleration-stat (A-stat) cultivations in which the dilution rate is continuously changed with a constant acceleration rate are not so time-consuming, especially at high acceleration rates. Therefore, the A-stat could be advantageous to use instead of the chemostat. However, the highest acceleration rate, meaning the fastest A-stat that can be applied for estimating steady-state culture characteristics, is not known yet. Experimental results obtained with Zygosaccharomyces rouxii, an important yeast in soy sauce processes, showed that the culture characteristics during the A-stat with an acceleration rate of 0.001 h(-2) were roughly comparable to those of the chemostat. For higher acceleration rates the deviation between the culture characteristics in the A-stat and those in the chemostat obtained at the same dilution rate generally started to increase. The source of these deviations was examined by simulation for Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The simulations demonstrated that this deviation was not only dependent on the metabolic adaptation rate of the yeast, but also on the rate of change in environmental substrate concentrations during A-stats. From this work, it was concluded that an A-stat with an acceleration rate of 0.001 h(-2) is attractive to be used instead of chemostat whenever a rough estimation of steady-state culture characteristics is acceptable.
Copyright 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.