A response surface study on the role of some environmental factors affecting the growth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The combined effect of pH, ethanol and fructose on the growth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae at 25 °C was studied by the standard Response Surface Methodology. Canonical analysis of the obtained response surface led to the conclusion that the effects of ethanol and fructose can be described by a single factor, the value of water activity, which can be calculated from the other two. Therefore the number of explanatory variables can be reduced. The computational usefulness of the transformation bw = √(1 − aw) is demonstrated.