I am going to determine the amount of lipids produced by a kind of yeast. However, because the culture medium produces lots of foam during aeration, I have to use a kind of anti foam.
I would like to know if silicone antfoam can be use without any interference with lipid analysis.
Silicone Anti-foam products could be oel-free. If an emulsion (silicone based) is used, I would guess, that the emulsifier´s add -ons, contain fat-like molecules, which could influence your lipid analysis. Anyway, I suggest to contact the antifoam supplier.
With fancy technologies (HPLC, GC, MASS C and more), you can analyze the antifoam yourself.
So is there any method to break the foam in a lab bio reactor without interfering with lipid analysis?
Most of the defoamers wont interfere with product analysis. Example you can use Silicone Antifoam (SIgma. Cat No. 85390). In industry we use similar silicone based defoamer and have no problem during product analysis. If you think the defoamers in influencing the lipid analysis, you can run a GC with a known quantity of defoamer and you can identify the peak during your product analysis. We used above defoam for omega-hydroxy fatty acids and had no problem.
Hi Rasoul
Silicone antifoams can conatin lipids, some MOs are also sensitiv to them.
There is a possibility with some surfactants, that you can add before start. They build a defined foam inside the bio-reactor and you don't need to add it during the run and your lipid analysisi starts from a given background
You can choose f. E. a non-ionic surfactant Pluronic (0,1% abs), sometimes the effetcs of aeration are also increased.
The result wil l not be a foam-free fermentation, but in many cases you get a defined foam that does not disturb. Sometimes one can be mislead, if you use Pluronic like you use the silicon defoamers, than it appears that you get more foam in case of usage.
