Construction of Mini-Chemostats for High-throughput Strain Characterization

We developed a mini-chemostat system with 16 reactors, each at a working volume of 40 ml. Sensors measure dissolved oxygen in the reactor, while OD600 is measured in the outflow. We further developed a CO2 and pH sensor array that can be plugged in to the outflow of the reactors. The system was used to characterize yeast physiology at four metabolically different conditions: limitations of glucose, both aerobic and anaerobic, nitrogen, and ethanol. The physiology of yeast cells grown at the four different conditions in the mini-chemostat (MC) system was compared with yeast cells grown in a DASGIP 1L system using RNAseq analysis Cells were grown in Glucose-limited, Nitrogen-limited, Ethanol-limited or Oxygen/Glucose-limited chemostat cultivations were measured in biological triplicates