Parallel image analysis of morphological yeast cells

Abstract

Fermentation is a critical process for the production simpler substances from organic molecules or could be used to obtain the ethanol by the anaerobic breaking down of sugar. In this work we present different image analysis steps in order to characterize the cell morphology during the biotechnology process. The cell morphology is an important element of the stress which could disturb the production of the biomass or a metabolite. For this purpose we develop a Java software dedicated to an automatic analysis. The software allows us to have information about the growth cells, morphometric analysis (volume/surface) and morphology (budding cells). We want to have the information in biological real time to be able to modify the control parameters, therefore the image is cut into small slices which are analyzed separately by a parallel algorithm. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.