Fig. 7

Comparison of E. coli’s anaerobic phenotype in bioreactors and microplates. a Schematic showing typical fermentation pathways in E. coli. Typical products of mixed acid fermentation on glucose are shown in the pathway along with key fermentation reactions shown in italics. The metabolites measured in this study are shown in blue. b Microbial phenotypes reduced to two components through t-distributed stochastic neighbors embedding (t-SNE) performed on the metabolite (acetate, formate, lactate, pyruvate, and succinate) yields and growth rates of E. coli strains grown in rich defined media in a bioreactor and microplates with different initial concentrations of substrate (glucose). Cluster boundaries were drawn manually for illustrative purposes. c A comparison of WildType E. coli’s growth rate and metabolite yields on glucose obtained from a bench-top 0.5 L bioreactor and 96-well microplates with different initial concentrations of substrate (glucose)