Adaptive parameter estimation applied to the production of temperate phages in continuous culture

The paper presents a new adaptive estimation method for a class of nonlinear systems whose form is suitable for describing the dynamics of biological processes. Two levels of estimation problems are distinguished : the estimation of constant parameters and the estimation of time-varying parameters. In the application to biological processes, since the evolutions of biomass, substrates and metabolites are often linearly independent of time, the persistently exciting condition for the estimation of time-varying parameters can often be satisfied. The method was applied to identify the process of the production of temperate phages in continuous culture. This is an important economical problem because some industrial strains are sensitive to phage infection. For this process, an adaptive estimation scheme was established to identify some biological constants and two reaction rates. The efficiency was verified by the simulation results