The “Growth Curve”: An Autocorrelation Effect

Abstract

A purposely naïve and semi-empirical model allows for the reproduction of the phenomenological behavior of any real microbial culture by adjusting the values of three parameters, which have a biological meaning only for a virtual microbial culture that mimics the behavior of the real ones. Any genomic, biochemical, and physical peculiarity (microbial species, physiological condition, pH, water activity, temperature, etc.) that distinguishes one real culture from another is “translated” to an effect of the degree of progress of the population density and cell age in the virtual culture. The model leads to a self-consistent description of the growth curve, which looks like the result of an autocorrelation effect. This explains why, in spite of genomic and physiologic differences, all the growth curves show a sigmoid trend. The traditional growth curve and the subsequent exponential decay in the log(N)-vs-t plot can be replaced by straight-line trends when referring to the degree of progress of the population density of the virtual culture.