What this work is about, in plain words
Can one find out how much pigment the cells contain without extracting it, from the spectrum of the living culture? The authors proposed a simple mathematical model of such a spectrum.
Usually, to find out pigment content, the pigments are extracted from cells with solvents and analyzed. Optical methods make it possible to do without this and to work with living cells, and quickly. This matters, for example, for automatic control of cultivation. But the spectrum of a living culture is complex, and the simple physical law of absorption cannot be applied to it directly. The authors set out to build a mathematical model of the spectrum that would allow pigment concentrations to be determined.
The work is theoretical. The absorption spectrum of a culture in the range of photosynthetically active radiation is represented as a sum of simple components. The more components, the more accurate the description.
The authors obtained mathematical relations for calculating pigment concentrations from the spectrum. To apply them to a specific culture, the model parameters must be calculated once from its spectrum, and biochemical analysis must determine how strongly each pigment absorbs light in living cells.
The work lays the foundation for rapid optical monitoring of the pigment composition of cultures.
Limitations. This is a theoretical model. For practical use, it needs to be calibrated for each species using biochemical analysis.