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Abstract
The potential of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for bacterial identification has been explored employing Escherichia coli (E. coli) as an example.
E. coli produced a distinct pattern of changes in the media, different from several other organisms. These changes are time dependent and inversely related to media concentration and can be detected after one hour incubation. Some of these changes have been subjected to chemical analysis and it was found that E. coli rapidly degraded tryptophan and produced indole. The ratio of tryptophan to phenylalanine in the media served as a good index for bacterial growth. Different isolates of E. coli showed the same metabolic pattern. Although other bacteria are capable of degrading tryptophan, they produced a different pattern.
HPLC appears to have a potential for rapidly identifying bacterial isolates and may provide a useful tool for use in microbiology laboratories.