96 Bottles of Beer: Metabolic Profiling of Spent Growth Media Using Rapid, High Throughput Capillary Electrophoresis-Electrospray Ionization-Mass Spectrometry

Overview

Bioreactor monitoring is a vital part of quality control and process refinement. There is an ever-growing demand for high throughput analysis methods capable of delivering metabolic profiling data rapidly to the user without the need for extensive sample processing. The presence and concentration of biogenic analytes can often indicate the progress and success or failure of the production process. Beer production is no exception to this as several metabolites have been identified as indicators of beer quality. Here we demonstrate the detection and quantitation of several biogenic amines that have been shown to affect beer flavor. Using a microfluidic capillary electrophoresis (CE)-MS platform (ZipChip^®, 908 Devices, Boston MA) we can rapidly (<4 min) analyze a wide range of biologically relevant metabolites with virtually no sample preparation.