About biomass overyielding of mixed cultures in batch processes

Abstract

We study mechanisms that can produce an increase of biomass production in batch processes when considering mixed cultures, compared to pure cultures. We show that growth thresholds or variable yields can produce ‘overyielding’, while this is not possible in the classical batch model with multiple species. We give sufficient conditions on the characteristics of the species to obtain overyielding, and illustrate these theoretical results with numerical simulations. This work provides new insights on species complementary in models of mixed cultures, without having to consider direct interactions terms between species as, for instance in the well known Generalized Lotka–Volterra model.