Reflections on the aerobic fermentation stoichiometry of Crabtree positive yeasts

In this communication a stoichiometric steady state model for Crabtree positive yeasts is proposed. The model is sufficiently simple to be corroborated by experimental data on the key metabolic events around Dcrit. The key feature of the model is that the bottleneck aperture for biomass production in the model of Sonnleitner and Käppeli, 1986 shrinks abruptly at Dcrit and continues to decrease with increasing dilution rate. A black box stoichiometric analysis of experiments reported in literature indicates that production of acetaldehyde might account for the abrupt shrinkage through a severe poisoning effect on the respiratory system.