Integrated Kinetic and Probabilistic Modeling of the Growth Potential of Bacterial Populations

When bacteria are exposed to osmotic stress, some cells recover and grow, while others die or are unculturable. This leads to a viable count growth curve where the cell number decreases before the onset of the exponential growth phase. From such curves, it is impossible to estimate what proportion of the initial cells generates the growth because it leads to an ill-conditioned numerical problem. Here, we applied a combination of experimental and statistical methods, based on optical density measurements, to infer both the probability of growth and the maximum specific growth rate of the culture. We quantified the growth potential of a bacterial population as a quantity composed from the probability of growth and the “suitability” of the growing subpopulation to the new environment. We found that, for all three laboratory media studied, the probability of growth decreased while the “work to be done” by the growing subpopulation (defined as the negative logarithm of their suitability parameter) increased with NaCl concentration. The results suggest that the effect of medium on the probability of growth could be described by a simple shift parameter, a differential NaCl concentration that can be accounted for by the change in the medium composition. Finally, we highlighted the need for further understanding of the effect of the osmoprotectant glycine betaine on metabolism.