Description

I was involved in a research project with several other people at Augusta State University where we were looking at using the process of Genetic Programming to predict cellular growth based on limited data. The idea was to gather data for the full duration on some culture growths (I think they used Serratia for the cultures) and we ran analysis on it to generate 20 "idealized" models of the environment. Then, we input data from new culture samples (from a different set than the last) and see how close we can model the results. As you can see from the attached graph, pretty well. We were supposed to have samples taken at even intervals but as you can see from the data we had to pad some of the input data as the lab assistant did not take samples at even intervals, this could only have helped the prediction. We were very surprised to see the results, especially how well it smoothed out the curve, and a formal paper is forthcoming following more testing. The culturing and life cycle, or so I understand as I just did programming on the project and very little on the biology side, can take up to 40 hours or so to go through all the phases (lag, log, stationary, death), we hoped to simulate the rest of the curve given a limited set (maybe only half the hours say). We kept all variables the same between batches, but hopefully this could be expanded further to include variations in temperature, pH, etc.