(Chemostat and Bioprocesses) 1st Edition
by Claude Lobry (Author)
Better known as the "predator-prey
relationship," the consumer-resource relationship means the situation
where a single species of organisms consumes for survival and
reproduction. For example, Escherichia coli consumes glucose, cows
consume grass, cheetahs consume baboons; these three very different
situations, the first concerns the world of bacteria and the resource is
a chemical species, the second concerns mammals and the resource is a
plant, and in the final case the consumer and the resource are mammals,
have in common the fact of consuming.
In a chemostat,
microorganisms generally consume (abiotic) minerals, but not always,
bacteriophages consume bacteria that constitute a biotic resource. 'The
Chemostat' book dealt only with the case of abiotic resources.
Mathematically this amounts to replacing in the two equation system of
the chemostat the decreasing function by a general increasing then
decreasing function. This simple change has greatly enriched the theory.
This book shows in this new framework the problem of competition for
the same resource.
