Modeling Microbial Growth Curves with GCAT

In this work, we introduce the Growth Curve Analysis Tool (GCAT). GCAT is designed to enable efficient analysis of high-throughput microbial growth curve data collected from cultures grown in microtiter plates. GCAT is accessible through a web browser, making it easy to use and operating system independent. GCAT implements fitting of global sigmoid curve models and local regression (LOESS) model. We assess the relative merits of these approaches using experimental data. Additionally, GCAT implements heuristics to deal with some peculiarities of growth curve data commonly encountered in bioenergy research. GCAT server is publicly available at http://gcat-pub.glbrc.org/. The source code is available at http://code.google.com/p/gcat-hts/.