Design and Use of Multiplexed Chemostat Arrays

Chemostats are continuous culture systems in which cells are grown in a tightly controlled, chemically constant environment where culture density is constrained by limiting specific nutrients.(1,2) Data from chemostats are highly reproducible for the measurement of quantitative phenotypes as they provide a constant growth rate and environment at steady state. For these reasons, chemostats have become useful tools for fine-scale characterization of physiology through analysis of gene expression(3-6) and other characteristics of cultures at steady-state equilibrium.(7) Long-term experiments in chemostats can highlight specific trajectories that microbial populations adopt during adaptive evolution in a controlled environment. In fact, chemostats have been used for experimental evolution since their invention.(8) A common result in evolution experiments is for each biological replicate to acquire a unique repertoire of mutations.(9-13) This diversity suggests that there is much left to be discovered by performing evolution experiments with far greater throughput. We present here the design and operation of a relatively simple, low cost array of miniature chemostats—or ministats—and validate their use in determination of physiology and in evolution experiments with yeast. This approach entails growth of tens of chemostats run off a single multiplexed peristaltic pump. The cultures are maintained at a 20 ml working volume, which is practical for a variety of applications. It is our hope that increasing throughput, decreasing expense, and providing detailed building and operation instructions may also motivate research and industrial application of this design as a general platform for functionally characterizing large numbers of strains, species, and growth parameters, as well as genetic or drug libraries.