期刊名称：Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology
电子版ISSN：2157-7463
出版年度：2012
卷号：3
期号：5
页码：1-2
DOI：10.4172/2157-7463.1000e109
语种：English
出版社：OMICS International
摘要：Kinetic description of microbiological processes is vital for the design and control of microbe-based biotechnologies such as waste water treatment, petroleum oil recovery, and contaminant attenuation and remediation. Various models have been proposed to describe microbiological processes. Monod equation, which is named for Noble Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod, is by far the most widely used approach. The model relates microbial growth rates to the concentration of a limiting nutrient, for example, dissolved organic carbon, using a hyperbolic equation. The Monod equation has the same form as the Michaelis-Menten equation for enzymatic kinetics. However, the former is considered to be empirical, while the latter has been proved theoretically. Whether the Monod kinetics is theoretically correct, at least macroscopically, remains to be found. We may recall that the theory of the Michaelis-Menten enzymatic kinetics involves the formation of an enzyme-substrate complex as the key hypothetical step to hyperbolically link the rate and substrate concentration. This hypothesis was not proved until many years later when the existence of such a complex was experimentally demonstrated.
