Continuous culture – making a comeback?

Abstract

The heyday of continuous culture was in the 1960s, when its versatility and reproducibility were used to address fundamental problems in diverse microbiological fields such as biochemistry, ecology, genetics and physiology. The advent of molecular genetics in the 1970s and 1980s led to a decline in the popularity of continuous culture as a standard laboratory tool. The current trend of studying global proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics requires reproducible, reliable and biologically homogeneous datasets with which to approach a given problem. The use of continuous culture techniques can aid the acquisition of such data, and continuous cultures offer advantages over biologically heterogeneous batch cultures, where secondary growth and stress effects can often mask subtle physiological differences and trends. This review is intended to remind microbiologists of the value of continuous cultivation in a wide range of biological investigations, and describes some advantages and recent advances in applications of continuous culture in post-genomic studies.

Revisiting the role of yeast Sfp1 in ribosome biogenesis and cell size control: a chemostat study

“…The advantages of using chemostat cultures for physiological and metabolic studies have been widely recognized (Brauer et al, 2005;Hoskisson & Hobbs, 2005;Porro et al, 2003;Wu et al, 2006). Nevertheless, they have not yet found wide application in molecular and cell biology.…”

“…We have studied the role of SFP1 by growing an sfp1D mutant and the isogenic reference strain in continuous cultures where the specific growth rate is equal to the dilution rate (D, expressed as h 21 ), which can be easily controlled (Hoskisson & Hobbs, 2005). Thus, chemostat cultivation allowed for a comparison of both strains at the same specific growth rate.…”

Coenzyme A-transferase-independent butyrate re-assimilation in Clostridium acetobutylicum—evidence from a mathematical model

“…In comparison to batch cultures, continuous cultures offer the advantage of generating highly reproducible, reliable, and homogeneous data -a crucial prerequisite for global transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic studies. Furthermore, secondary growth and stress responses of cells growing in a batch might obscure physiological differences (Hoskisson and Hobbs 2005). For our experiments we used the wild type strain ATCC 824 (COSMIC strain) and the group II intron retargeted mutant strain Cac-ctfA398s::CT originating from the COSMIC strain (Cooksley et al 2012).…”

An Effective Method of Continuous Production of Erythritol from Glycerol by Yarrowia lipolytica MK1

“…However, the disadvantages of these processes are the diffi culty in ensuring aseptic conditions and the possibility of degeneration or mutation of strains (27,28). Some of the well-described continuous processes using Y. lipolytica yeast include the production of lipids from molasses and glycerol-containing medium (29) and the production of citric acid using glycerol as a carbon source (1).…”