Fig. 1

Schematic of a three-stage growth-decoupled fed-batch pDNA production process (1. batch, 2. fed-batch with cell growth, 3. fed-batch without cell growth). Size of the variables and length of the stages are not to scale. As the batch process was kept unchanged, it was not included in the fed-batch optimization simulations. Instead, the simulation starts at the beginning of the feed (\(t = {0}\;\textrm{h}\)) with realistic values for the process variables at batch end (Additional file 1: Table S1)