Carbohydrate analysis bacteria

Beyond the essentially bacteriological methods involved in the production of bacteria, or of the culture media in which they have grown, special methods are confined to extraction procedures. Purification and analysis employ the methods of carbohydrate chemistry generally, but, in much... 

Current methods take root in the early 1960s, when the conformational analysis of macromolecules became of general interest [29-30]. Anderson et al. [31] used model building and X-ray diffraction studies to determine the double helical structures of polysaccharides using crystalline structure data as an initial set of coordinates followed by computational sampling of new structures by rotation around selected covalent bonds. The details of these so-called hard-sphere calculations are described in Rees and Skerrett [32] and Rees and Smith [33]. This approach was also applied to carbohydrate conformations in the analysis of bacteria and polysaccharidic structures and linkages [34-35]. 

Fatty acid profiling by GC is routine in some clinical reference laboratories, particularly for identification of anaerobic bacteria. Fatty acids and lipids are bonded to proteins, carbohydrates, or other chemical entities in microbial cell walls and membranes. Fatty acids of chain length from Cg to C20 are useful for identifying Gram negative organisms at the species and genus levels. Perhaps the only automated GC-based microbial characterization system that is commercially available is a microbial analysis system based on derivatization GC of fatty acid methyl esters (Microbial ID, Inc., Newark, NJ). °... 

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