Authors: Jean-Luc Gouzé ¹; Valérie Lemesle ¹

• 1 Modeling and control of renewable resources

In a chemostat, transient oscillations are often experimentally observed during cell growth. The aim of this paper is to propose simple autonomous models which are able (or not) to generate these oscillations, and to investigate them analytically. Our point of view is based on a simplification of the cell cycle in which there are two states (mature and immature) with the transfer between the two dependent on the available resources. We built two similar models, one with cell biomass and the other with cell number density. We prove that the first one oscillates, but not the second. This paper is dedicated to Claude Lobry, who helped us to build a first version of these models.