The decisive role of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cycle behaviour for dynamic growth characterization

Abstract

The dynamic behaviour of the cell cycle and the physiology of Saccharomyces cerevisiae was monitored in transient experiments. Frequent flow cytometric analyses of the DNA (nuclear phase state) and the cell size enabled us to characterize the proliferation properties of yeast cells under well controlled and undisturbed cultivation conditions. Preliminarily, the correlation between flow cytometric light scattering measurements and the cell size was attested for yeasts. These flow cytometric results are compared with the physiological behaviour of the culture that was detected by high resolution on-line analyses and off-line measurements. The presented results focus on the importance of the yeast cell cycle behaviour for the dynamic growth characterization. Any kind of transients in yeast cultures induced partial synchronization. The characteristics and the time course of the yeast cell cycle were found to be strongly dependent on the physiological environment.