Estimation of microbial growth parameters by means of artificial neural networks

An alternative method based on artificial neural networks (ANN) for the estimation of kinetic growth parameters of a microorganism is performed by applying an automatic regression on different sections of the growth curve so as to obtain more precise growth rate and lag-time values. Through the combination of genetic algorithms and pruning methods more simple neural networks are obtained, where the goodness of fitness is a combination of an error function with another function associated with the network's complexity. An interesting application of this method was the estimation of kinetic parameters in microbial growth (growth rate and lag-time) and specifically in our case, the analysis of the effect of NaCl concentration, pH level and storage temperature on the growth curves of Lactobacillus plantarum. In this study it was hoped that the architecture of the obtained model would be very simple, but still keep its adequate capacity of generalization. The comparison performed between the average standard error of predictions (SEP) obtained for the estimation of growth rate and lag-time by the automatic regression (20 and 24%, respectively) and by the Gompertz estimation (22 and 28%) showed the utility of this method.