Open Access Publication of the Month – Dr. Stephan Noack (IBG-1) et al.
15 June 2022
In this month’s open access publication, Jochen Nießer, Moritz Fabian Müller, Jannick Kappelmann, Wolfgang Wiechert, and Stephan Noack from IBG-1 present a miniaturized, parallelized, and automated approach to 13C-isotopic labelling experiments at a microtitre plate scale.
The development of a new method to quickly stop cell metabolism (a process known as “quenching”) in samples containing biomass on the submillilitre scale was crucial for this approach. The samples can be obtained from up to 48 parallel cultivation batches in microtitre plates and processed automatically on a laboratory robot platform. As a result, highly informative experiments with selected producer strains can be carried out in future to characterize the material flow from the respective substrate to the target product more precisely.
The extraction of microbial production strains – which are used for the manufacture of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and feed or food additives – plays a central role in biotechnological research. Depending on the issue being investigated, different approaches are used to characterize either the natural properties of microorganisms or those introduced by genetic modification. Conventional evaluation parameters such as growth rate or product titre can now be determined automatically and using high-throughput techniques for entire strain libraries by means of cultivation in microtitre plates. In contrast, the experimental procedures for a detailed, temporally resolved insight into cell metabolism are much more complex. They involve a higher number of manual steps and reagents to be used, and can thus be regarded as a bottleneck. A well-established method to “intracellularly screen” cells under different cultivation conditions is based on the use of substrates enriched with isotopes.
The open access publication entitled “Hot isopropanol quenching procedure for automated microtiter plate scale 13C-labeling experiments” was published in the journal Microbial Cell Factories.
Internet – Institute of Bio- and Geosciences – Biotechnology (IBG-1)