In chemostat culture, the microaerophilic, CO2 requiring, gingival-plaque-associated bacterium Capnocytophaga gingivalis responded to the addition of glucose (1-6 g I-1) by doubling its growth rate and increasing its biomass yield fivefold. The data suggest that the glucose is catabolized by a fully aerobic route. Rather than repressing hydrolytic enzymes which might be associated with pathogen...

To breed resistance to an assortment of infectious phages, continuous cultures of Escherichia coli JM109 grown in a chemostat were exposed to phage mixtures prepared from sewage influent. Four sequential chemostat-grown cultures were each infected with a different phage mixture. At the end of a chemostat run, one phage-resistant colony was isolated and used to inoculate the subsequent culture. ...

The role of the rRNA gene copy number as a central component of bacterial life histories was studied by using strains of Escherichia coli in which one or two of the seven rRNA operons (rrnA and/or rrnB) were deleted. The relative fitness of these strains was determined in competition experiments in both batch and chemostat cultures. In batch cultures, the decrease in relative fitness correspond...

A derivative of the anaerobic bacterium Clostridium phytofermentans was isolated and shown to produce two moles of hydrogen per mole of glucose and similar yields from cellulosic feedstocks. The strain (cpnit-1) was selected for its rapid growth in a chemostat under nitrogen fixation conditions. The rare ability of cpnit-1 to stably, anaerobically produce hydrogen while rapidly fixing its own n...