Fast quantitative determination of microbial rhamnolipids from cultivation broths by ATR-FTIR Spectroscopy.
BACKGROUND
Vibrational spectroscopic techniques are becoming increasingly important and popular because they have the potential to provide rapid and convenient solutions to routine analytical problems. Using these techniques, a variety of substances can be characterized, identified and also quantified rapidly.


RESULTS
The rapid ATR-FTIR (Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy) in time technique has been applied, which is suitable to quantify the concentrations of microbial rhamnolipids in a typical cultivation process. While the usually applied HPLC analysis requires an extensive and time consuming multi step extraction protocol for sample preparation, the ATR-FTIR-method allows the quantification of the rhamnolipids within 20 minutes. Accuracies between 0.5 g/l - 2.1 g/l for the different analytes were determined by cross validation of the calibration set. Even better accuracies between 0.28 g/l - 0.59 g/l were found for independent test samples of an arbitrarily selected cultivation.


CONCLUSIONS
ATR-FTIR was found to be suitable for the rapid analysis of rhamnolipids in a biotechnological process with good reproducibility in sample determination and sufficient accuracy. An improvement in accuracy through continuous expansion and validation of the reference spectra set seems very likely.
Leitermann
Frank
F
Research University Karlsruhe, Institute of Engineering in Life Sciences, Section of Technical Biology, Engler-Bunte-Ring 1, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany. Rudolf.Hausmann@tebi.uni-karlsruhe.de.
Syldatk
Christoph
C
Hausmann
Rudolf
R