応用微生物学: オープンアクセス
オープンアクセス

概要

Attempted Fractionation of LB Lennox Medium via Reversed Phase High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Wenfa Ng

Mass balance analysis is a highly useful tool for chemical engineering analysis of biological processes. Specifically, composition and amounts of inputs to a cell could be correlated with measurement of metabolic by-products and outputs for inferring metabolic fluxes flowing through specific cellular metabolic pathways. However, the composition of many common microbiological growth medium remains ill-defined with batch-to-batch variation. Thus, a need exists for developing methods for effective fractionation and separation of common growth medium. Using 5 g/L yeast extract, 10 g/L tryptone, and LB Lennox medium as model systems, this work attempted the fractionation of the three complex growth mixtures using C-18 Reversed Phase High Performance Liquid Chromatography (RPHPLC). Results revealed no effective fractionation of the three mixtures. More importantly, experiment results indicated that appropriate choice of detection wavelength for visualizing the chromatogram made a huge difference to understanding the effectiveness of fractionation achieved. Specifically, in the case of yeast extract, tryptone and LB Lennox medium, 194 nm may be a more appropriate detection wavelength compared to 280 nm. Collectively, C-18 RP-HPLC was not effective in separating 5 g/L yeast extract, 10 g/L tryptone and LB Lennox medium with hydrophilic mobile phases (ethanol/water mixture).