Abstract
By using a brewer''s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) as a test organism, the authors investigated the optimal operation of the seed culture process on the basis of physiological activities such as the specific rate of substrate consumption and that of cellular growth. Here, we adopted cell mass production per unit amount of substrate per unit process time for the whole seed culture process as an objective function for this optimization in order to conserve raw material as well as to raise the rate of operation of seed fermentors. Expression of the cell mass yield and the fermentation time as functions of both the initial cell mass concentration and the propagation ratio of one seed culture fermentor made the optimization procedure simple and provided a sound explanation for the optimum strategies. A new view was obtained about the optimal operation of the seed culture process.
