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Relating Fractal Dimension To Branching Behaviour In Filamentous Microorganisms, David Barry, Onwuarolu Ifeyinwa, Shauna Mcgee, Raymond Ryan, Gwilym Williams, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

The productivity of an industrial fermentation process involving a filamentous microbe is heavily dependent on the morphological form adopted by the organism. The development of systems capable of rapidly and accurately characterising morphology within a given process represents a significant challenge to biotechnologists, as the complex phenotypes that are manifested are often not easily quantified. Conventional parameters employed in these analyses are of limited value, as they reveal little about the specific branching behaviour of the organism, which is an important consideration given the demonstrated link between branching frequency and metabolite production. More recently, fractal geometry has been employed in …