Method Development for Bacterial Extracts
The LC-MS/MS method described previously, having been validated with respect to its performance for purified metabolites, was tested on bacterial cell extracts (exponential phase). Extracts from bacteria grown both in unlabeled (12C-) and (with appropriate modification of the SRMs to account for the molecular weight increase) 13C-glucose were tested. Approximately 50% of the metabolites failed to give a specific and reproducible signal from the bacterial cell extracts, indicating that many of these metabolites are present in the bacterial extracts in low amounts. For a smaller number of metabolites, interfering peaks arising from other biological materials were present either in 12C- or in 13C-grown bacterial extracts and precluded reliable analysis. Therefore, analysis of bacterial extracts focused on 36 compounds for which both 12C- and 13C-grown cells showed readily detectable peaks without interferences. A method involving 72 SRMs corresponding to the 12C- and 13C-forms of these 36 metabolites (divided as described previously into segments) was developed accordingly.