Exploring in vivo violacein biosynthesis by application of multivariate curve resolution on fused UV-VIS absorption, fluorescence, and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry data

In this work, the application of multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) is proposed for extracting information from multitechnique fused multivariate data (UV-VIS absorption, fluorescence, and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry) gathered during the biosynthesis of violacein pigment. Experimental data sets were pretreated and arranged in a row-wise augmented data matrix before their chemometric investigation. Five different chemical components were resolved. Kinetic and spectral information about these components were obtained and their relationship with violacein biosynthesis was established. Three new chemical compounds with molar masses of 453, 465, and 479 u, until now not reported in the literature, were identified and proposed as intermediates in the biosynthesis of other indolocarbazoles. The precursor (tryptophan), one intermediate (deoxyviolacein), and the final product (violacein) of violacein biosynthesis were identified and characterized using the proposed approach. The chemometric procedure based on the MCR-ALS method has proved to be a powerful tool to investigate violacein biosynthesis and its application can be easily extended to the study of other bioprocesses.