Chromatography Forum

Hi, all -

Does anyone have any experience with cleaning up fermentation samples for HPLC (and GC) analysis?

We run sample for sugars, organic acids and ethanol, but the samples come in a muck of microbe substrate and nutrients. Currently, we simply centrifuge and filter, but I'm not convinced this is removing all the nasties from our samples.

Does anyone have any tips? I don't know if there's a magical SPE column that could preserve our analytes while getting rid of the muck.

Any input is helpful.

H_H

All the substances you are interested in are hydrophilic, I guess they would be possible to retain on a HILIC SPE.
All proteins and hopefully much of the other stuff in the "muck" will be percipitated in 80-90% Acetonitrile, which will be the injection solvent for a HILIC SPE.
Further information is available at:

http://www.sequant.com/zichilicspe

If you are interested in testing our ZIC-HILIC SPE please mail us at support@mercksequant.com and we will try to help you with some evaluation samples.

Another method would be a pass-through method using an Oasis HLB cartridge, or a small modification of the pass-through method. You load your sample onto the Oasis cartrige and collect the material that elutes. It will contain sugars, and most ionized acids, while retaining essentially all the muck. Ethanol and more non-polar acids may require a dash of acetonitrile (no more than 5%) for elution.