A novel straightforward analytical technique was developed to monitor the emission of hydrogen from anaerobic bacteria cultured in sealed headspace vials using a specific hydrogen sensor. Bacteria emit also volatile organic compounds, (VOCs) which are amenable to analysis by headspace gas chromatography (HS-GC). Antibiotics added to the sample cultures are apparently effective if the emission of hydrogen is suppressed, or if not, are either ineffective or the related bacteria are even resistant. The sensor approach was applied to prove bacterial contamination in food, animals, medical specimens and ticks infected by Borrelia bacteria and their transfer to humans, thus causing Lyme disease. Static headspace gas chromatography was first applied in examining the growth of bacteria in milk and has found wide applications in chemistry, physics, food, and medicine whenever volatile compounds are emitted from complex matrices. The emitted volatiles from bacterial cultures comprise a wide range of organic compounds (VOCs), but although the composition of the emitted VOCs contains much information, the pattern produced is in general not sufficiently informative to identify infectious microbes in the genus and possibly to the strain level but can be used to detect bacterial contamination in various samples and to study the efficacy of natural and chemical antibiotics. Antimicrobial resistance is a serious issue in medicine that often renders ineffective any effort to treat patients with bacterial infections and it may become even worse in the future. Antimicrobial resistance is the ability of microorganisms to withstand attack by antibiotics. For this reason, novel antibiotics are needed to treat such multi-resistant microbes. As an alternative to new pharmaceutical antibiotics, there is much interest in searching for natural compounds with biocide properties. Such research however requires broad investigations with many measurements and this need calls urgently for automation. Automated HS-GC is an established analytical tool and is well suited for screening applications to process many samples. This is particularly useful in the search for natural compounds with antimicrobial properties as an alternative to the increasing number of multi-resistant chemical antibiotics which have lost their efficacy. GC is an effective technique to separate a multi-component mixture, buut a specific sensor may be an alternative if a single compound only should be detected. The study presented here is focused on the determination of emitted hydrogen (H2) from bacterial cultures in closed septum vials and both techniques, static-GC as well as the sensor approach, are compared in this study. Gas chromatography has the advantage of automatically process many samples, while the H2 sensor is a simple and very cheap device and thus sufficient if few samples only should be investigated. Both techniques have been used and compared in this work to monitor hydrogen emission from bacteria for example of the following applications
Author(s) Details:
Bruno Kolb
Student Research Centre, Überlingen, Obertorstrasse, Germany.
Recent Global Research Developments in Insights into Bacterial Classification and Diversity
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