I just need to confirm that the identified VOCs are actually produced by bacteria in bacterial culture media. And the ideal method is performing labeled precursors.
You should try to find what kind of VOCs are there and what may be from bacteria. Then use labeled precursors, just like people use labeled CO2 to examine plant VOC emission. The trick may be how to reduce your VOC background levels from your culture media.
First you should identify the metabolic pathway that yields the VOCs, than select appropriate precursor, set up cultures feed them with the precursor and monitor or collect for analysis the VOCs. You would need to resort to isotope ratio spectroscopy in order to prove that your VOCs are indeed enriched, which proves that they originate from the precursor. Its hard to say more without more details. If you have a radioisotope in mind then apart of safety and handling considerations the experiment would be similar, only you would use scintillation counter of sorts to measure the radioactivity. That approach also allows to measure the rate of the process if it is done in a time series fashion.
Good luck!
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