Microbial growth fluctuating in response to solar-terrestrial activity variations

Populations of microorganisms display fluctuations in the variable physiological and biochemical properties during cultivation under constant laboratory conditions. A series of explanations were proposed for this phenomenon, and different factors were studied as possible regulators. It was found that such fluctuations possess cosmic rhythms, but no factor(s) were proposed that could sufficiently explain and predict the magnitude of changes that happened on a daily basis in the long-term experiments. In this study we investigated specific growth rate fluctuations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeasts that were marked daily during cultivation under constant conditions. The effects of different solar and terrestrial factors were then analysed. The significant correlation indices were found for growth rate fluctuations against solar wind speed and the number of flares M on the Sun. These two factors determined the cyclic nature of the growth rate fluctuations, and thus its general course of increase or decrease. The effects of several other factors (Flares C number, planetary A index variation, and changes in the atmospheric factors such as temperature and humidity) and their two-way interactions were significant in producing an equation to describe the magnitude of changes of the yeast's growth parameters. The R2 of the equation achieved 91% and adjusted R2 was 78%. It is obvious that temperature and humidity are the factors that cannot directly influence the yeast populations under laboratory conditions and thus we suppose that they only reflect modifications of the really important factor(s) that take place in the Earth's atmosphere. We have concluded that different solar and terrestrial factors are responsible for the fluctuations in the daily kinetic parameters of the yeast growth.