A new bacterial species, Saccharothrix algeriensis NRRL B-24137, was isolated in 1992 in the Sahara desert. This filamentous bacterium is able to produce dithiolopyrrolones, molecules presenting antibacterial, antifungal, and anticancer properties. In this study, a "reaction engineering" approach was adopted to gain more knowledge on the growth of So. algeriensis and its dithiolopyrrolone production on a semisynthetic liquid medium. The objective is to establish a reaction scheme of the bacterium metabolism from extracellular experimental information, relatively easy to obtain. The approach enabled us to show that So. algeriensis could grow using several substrates that were sequentially consumed and that substrate limitation may induce a secondary metabolism in antibiotic production. From these qualitative data, a general reaction scheme was extracted consisting of four reactions: growth via amino acids, glucose consumption for maintenance, growth using glucose, and thiolutin production. The stoichiometric coefficients anti the reaction extends were identified using a factorial analysis based on the bilinear structure of the component mass balances in a batch reactor. The analysis of the reaction stoichiometry enabled us to draw some conclusions concerning the substrate consumption pathway. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.