The growth of cells is regulated by complex networks of interacting genetic and environmental factors1,2. The multifactorial regulation of cell growth necessitates a system-level approach to its study. However, the rigorous study of regulated cell growth is challenged by the difficulty of experimentally controlling the rate at which cells grow. Moreover, in even the simplest experiments extracellular conditions are frequently dynamic and complex as cells continuously alter their environment as they proliferate. A solution to these problems is provided by the chemostat: a method of culturing cells that enables experimental control of cell growth rates in defined, invariant and controlled environments.
The method of continuous culturing using a chemostat was independently described by Monod3 and Novick & Szilard4 in 1950. As originally conceived, cells are grown in a fixed volume of media that is continually diluted by addition of new media and simultaneous removal of old media and cells (Figure 1). Coupled ordinary differential equations (Figure 2) describe the rate of change in cell density (x) and the concentration of a growth-limiting nutrient (s) in the chemostat vessel. Importantly, this system of equations predicts a single (nonzero) stable steady-state (Figure 3) with the remarkable implication that at steady-state, the specific growth rate of the cells (i.e. the exponential growth rate constant) is equal to the rate at which the culture is diluted (D). By varying the dilution rate it is possible to establish steady-state populations of cells at different growth rates and under different conditions of nutrient limitation.
The experimental control of growth rate using chemostats was critical to the development of an understanding of how cell physiology changes with rates of growth5,6. However, this former mainstay of microbiological methods became increasingly obscure during the explosion in molecular biology research during the late twentieth century. Today, renewed interest in growth control in both microbes and multicellular organisms and the advent of genome-scale methods for systems-level analysis has renewed motivation for the use of chemostats. Here, we describe three applications that capitalize on the precise control of cell growth rates and the external environment that are uniquely possible using chemostats. First, we describe the use of chemostats to investigate how the abundance of thousands of biomolecules - such as transcripts and metabolites - are coordinately regulated with growth rate. Second, we describe how chemostats can be used to obtain precise estimates of growth-rate differences between different genotypes in nutrient-limited environments using competition experiments. Third, we describe how chemostats can be used to study adaptive evolution of cells growing in constant nutrient-poor environments. These examples exemplify the ways in which chemostats are enabling systems-level investigations of cell growth regulation, gene by environment interactions and adaptive evolution.