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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, March 2006, p. 2163-2169, Vol. 72, No. 3
0099-2240/06/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.72.3.2163-2169.2006
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Kinetics of Single Cells: Observation and Modeling of a Stochastic Process

Carmen Pin* and József Baranyi

Institute of Food Research, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7UA, United Kingdom

Received 29 July 2005/ Accepted 23 December 2005

The successive generation times for single cells of Escherichia coli K-12 were measured as described by A. Elfwing, Y. LeMarc, J. Baranyi, and A. Ballagi (Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 70:675-678, 2004), and the histograms they generated were used as empirical distributions to simulate growth of the population as the result of the multiplication of its single cells. This way, a stochastic birth model in which the underlying distributions were measured experimentally was simulated. To validate the model, analogous bacterial growth curves were generated by the use of different inoculum levels. The agreement with the simulation was very good, proving that the growth of the population can be predicted accurately if the distribution of the first few division times for the single cells within that population is known. Two questions were investigated by the simulation. (i) To what extent can we say that the distribution of the detection time, i.e., the time by which a single-cell-generated subpopulation reaches a detectable level, can be identified with that of the lag time of the original single cell? (ii) For low inocula, how does the inoculum size affect the lag time of the population?

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Institute of Food Research, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7UA, United Kingdom. Phone: 44 1603 255021. Fax: 44 1603 255288. E-mail: carmen.pin{at}bbsrc.ac.uk.

Applied and Environmental Microbiology, March 2006, p. 2163-2169, Vol. 72, No. 3
0099-2240/06/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.72.3.2163-2169.2006
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.



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