High-performance liquid chromatography of microbial acid metabolites.

The use of high-performance liquid chromatography with a cation-exchange column and effluent monitoring at 210 nm has been evaluated for the profiling of selected microbial metabolites including aliphatic, dicarboxylic, and phenolic acids, as an adjunct to the identification of selected bacteria, detection of bacterial metabolites in foods, and the monitoring of industrial microbial fermentations. Advantages of the technique include the simultaneous profiling of different classes of organic acids without derivatization. Most applications require only qualitative or semi-quantitative data. For others, data are given on the day-to-day reproducibility for several acids.