On-line targeted metabolomics for real-time monitoring of relevant
compounds in fermentation processes
Abstract
Fermentation monitoring is a powerful tool for bioprocess development
and optimisation. On-line metabolomics is a technology that is starting
to gain attention as a bioprocess monitoring tool, allowing the direct
measurement of many compounds in the fermentation broth at a very high
time resolution. In this work, targeted on-line metabolomics was used to
monitor 40 metabolites of interest during three Escherichia coli
succinate production fermentation experiments every 5 minutes with a
triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. This allowed capturing high time
resolution biological data that can provide critical information for
process optimisation. For 9 of these metabolites, simple univariate
regression models were used to model compound concentration from their
on-line mass spectrometry peak area. These on-line metabolomics
univariate models performed comparably to vibrational spectroscopy
multivariate PLS regressions models reported in the literature, which
typically are much more complex and time consuming to build. In
conclusion, this work shows how on-line metabolomics can be used to
directly monitor many bioprocess compounds of interest and obtain rich
biological and bioprocess data.