Flow injection analysis system for the supervision of industrial chromatographic downstream processing in biotechnology1This paper was presented at the Fifth World Congress on Biosensors, Berlin, Germany, 3–5 June 1998.1

Abstract

Sugar beet molasses is a natural resource for various products used in daily life, ranging from sucrose to amino acids for pharmaceutical industry. The separation of molasses into these high value components is performed on a large scale by ion exchange/exclusion chromatography. A biosensor system was set up for the “in time” analysis of serine and sucrose during molasses desugarisation. d-Serine was analysed with the multi-enzyme system d-serine dehydratase/lactic dehydrogenase and photometric detection of the NADH consumed. Sucrose was determined with invertase/mutarotase/glucose oxidase and the oxygen consumed was monitored amperometrically. An analysis could be performed within 2–5 min by directly injecting samples from the chromatographic process into the flow injection analysis system. The determination range for the sucrose analysis was 0–2.5 gl−1 and for the analysis of d-serine 0–0.5 gl−1. The standard deviation for the measurement of d-serine was 1.7%.