A kinetic model of plant nutrition described by Cloutier et al. (Cloutier et al., 2008. Biotechnol Bioeng 99: 189-200) is progressively simplified so as to obtain a predictive model that describes the evolution of the biomass and the extracellular and intracellular concentrations of three determining nutrients, that is, free intracellular nitrogen, phosphate, and carbohydrate compounds. Three techniques of global sensitivity analysis are successively applied to assess the model parameter influence and potential correlation. The resulting dynamic model is able to predict plant growth for the two most encountered plant bioprocesses, namely suspension cells and hairy roots. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2011;108: 1108-1118. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.