" Ippolito JE, Piwnica-Worms D. A Fluorescence-Coupled Assay for Gamma Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) Reveals Metabolic Stress-Induced Modulation of GABA Content in Neuroendocrine Cancer. Coppola D, ed. PLoS ONE. 2014;9(2):e88667. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0088667. "
Modern specialized instrumentation used for metabolic analyses, such as mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are expensive, require significant training to operate, and may not be readily available to many academic laboratories. Classical enzymatic-based metabolite quantitation, on the other hand, provides a cost-effective, readily accessible, sensitive means for quantitative analysis of metabolites . Enzymatic quantitation offers the ability to simultaneously quantitate a given metabolite across many samples on a high-throughput platform.
Regarding microbiological chemistry: Borate buffer is suggested to manipulate the GABA extract from corynebacterium in the following research:
Kanwal, S. and Incharoensakdi, A. (2016). Extraction and Quantification of GABA and Glutamate from Cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. Bio-protocol 6(18): e1928. DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.1928.