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.
Methods
Beer samples were stored frozen until all 96 were collected, then thawed, diluted 10x in water, centrifuged to remove particulates, diluted 10x in Metabolite Sample Diluent (908 Devices, Boston, MA) containing heavy isotope labeled amino acid internal standards, and then loaded directly into a 96 well plate. The plate was then placed into an autosampler equipped microfluidic CEESI devices (ZipChip Interface, 908 Devices, Boston, MA) which was coupled to an orbitrap MS (Exactive Plus EMR, Thermo Scientific) for analysis with a scan range of 70-350 m/z. A microfluidic chip with a 10 cm separation channel was used (ZipChip HSX). The chip was filled with Metabolites background electrolyte (BGE) and a field strength of 1000 V/cm was applied, yielding analysis times of 4 minutes.
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