Hi Esti,

running the medium through activated charcoal should remove the toluene. you might need to use fairly high quality charcoal. Alternatively if you only want to extract the toluene for anlaysis then you can re-extract the toluene from the charcoal afterwards. If and don't care about the culture media then a liquid-liquid soxhlet would be fine.

hope this helps,

cheers,

Richard

Vaseline oil (liquid paraffine) is safe, inert and eazy separable extractant

Dear Esti,

You may remove toluene from the medium as follows:

1/ via supercritical CO2 extraction

2/ by the method of toluene evaporation in a vacuum /a rotavap/- it could serve well

3/ by the method of co-evaporation of toluene with added water /exploiting Rault law/, in this case boiling temp. of an un-miscible mixture of two or more liquids is lower than those of single liquids.

4/ also a distillation with boiling water steam could be considered /method based on Rault law, too/.

Wishing you a good luck,

R.S.