AbstractThe advent of cell synchrony as a refinement in technique for cultivating microbes has given new dimensions to the study of microbial growth.By wedding synchrony to continuous culture, it becomes possible to convert and resolve the invariant (steady state) performance of asynchronous growth in a chemostat into a recognisable pattern of (cell cycle) activity, which repeats continually and occupies the mean doubling time periods of the cells growing in synchrony in a continuously synchronised culture. In this way, microbial growth and metabolism in a culture can be considered in terms of the individual cell instead of being related to the statistical mean of the cell population.Growth, continuous growth and continuously synchronised growth are considered in relation to these developments and an approach is made to account for the “physiological state”.