A novel colorimetric technique for estimating iron in magnetosomes of magnetotactic bacteria based on linear regression.

Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) use iron from their habitat to create magnetosomes, a unique organelle required for magnetotaxis. Due to a lack of cost-effective assay methods for estimating iron in magnetosomes, research on MTB and iron-rich magnetosomes is limited. A systemized assay was established in this study to quantify iron in MTB using ferric citrate colorimetric estimation. With a statistically significant R2 value of 0.9935, the iron concentration range and wavelength for iron estimation were optimized using linear regression. This colorimetric approach and the inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) exhibited an excellent correlation R2 value of 0.961 in the validatory correlative study of the iron concentration in the isolated magnetotactic bacterial strains. In large-scale screening studies, this less-expensive strategy could be advantageous.