Construction of a parsimonious kinetic model to capture microbial dynamics via parameter estimation

Understanding microbial kinetic behaviour is important for bioprocessing engineering, such as chemical synthesis and bioremediation. However, development of proper models to capture complicated microbial kinetics is a challenging task. In this study, we demonstrate a comparative analysis of the complexity and accuracy tradeoff for modelling the growth of Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 in a batch culture. Based on a series of analyses, including residual analysis, scaled sensitivity coefficient analysis, parameter correlation analysis and the F-test, we estimated model parameters to construct a parsimonious Monod-based model that used the fewest parameters for best simulation of Shewanella growth using different carbon substrates. Sequential analysis was also applied to identify the time window for estimating each parameter in the kinetic model. This study shows that statistics-based parameter estimation is an efficient method to successively reconstruct and fine tune kinetic models for complex biological systems.