Quantitative analysis of yeast growth process based on FT-NIR spectroscopy integrated with Gaussian mixture regression

To improve the yield of industrial fermentation, herein, we report a method based on Fourier-transform near-infrared spectroscopy (FT-NIR) to predict the growth of yeast. First, the spectra were obtained using an FT-NIR spectrometer during the process of yeast cultivation. Each spectrum was acquired over the range from 10 000 to 4000 cm−1, which resulted in spectra with 1557 variables. Moreover, the optical density (OD) value of each fermentation sample was determined via photoelectric turbidity method. Then, using a method based on competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS), characteristic wavelength variables were selected from the preprocessed spectral data. Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) algorithm was employed to develop the prediction model for the determination of OD. The results of the model based on GMR were achieved as follows: only 13 characteristic wavelength variables were selected by CRAS, the coefficient of determination Rp2 was 0.98842, and the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) was 0.07262 in the validation set. Finally, compared to kernel partial least squares regression (KPLS), support vector machine (SVM), and extreme learning machine (ELM) models, GMR model showed excellent performance for prediction and generalization. This study demonstrated that FT-NIR spectroscopy analysis technology integrated with appropriate chemometric approaches could be utilized to monitor the growth process of yeast, and GMR revealed its superiority in model calibration.