The purpose of this paper is to report on the development of a procedure for inferring black-box, yet biologically interpretable, dynamic models of bioprocesses based on sets of measurements of a few external components (biomass, substrates, and products of interest). The procedure has three main steps: (a) the determination of the number of macroscopic biological reactions linking the measured components; (b) the estimation of a first reaction scheme, which has interesting mathematical properties, but might lack a biological interpretation; and (c) the "projection" (or transformation) of this reaction scheme onto a biologically-consistent scheme. The advantage of the method is that it allows the fast prototyping of models for the culture of microorganisms that are not well documented. The good performance of the third step of the method is demonstrated by application to an example of microalgal culture.
Reaction networks; Mathematical modeling; Parameter estimation; Bioprocesses
