Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for Analysis of Metabolite Composition of Escherichia coli

To understand the composition of endogenous metabolites of Escherichia coli an important model organism, a series of high-resolution NMR spectroscopic methods were employed to analyze the metabolites of this strain qualitatively and quantitatively. We found that E. coli metabolome was dominated by more than 40 abundant metabolites including amino acids, organic acids, sugars, nucleoside and its derivatives involving many different metabolic pathways. We further found that glucose level was the highest in stationary-phase E. coli while glutamate, betaine, putrescine and ribose-5-phosphate levels were higher than other metabolites. Our results indicated that NMR method was effective to simultaneously detect the abundant bacterial metabolites of different polarity including both the primary and secondary metabolites.