If I am not wrong, spectrophotometric determination and quantification of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) will be cost-effective and time saving over highly expensive and sophisticated techniques such as GC etc.
Are you sure? It is a polymer. Although it might have some UV absorbance at low wavelength, how can you quantify it without the molecular weight? Also, there is no big difference between PHA and PHB. Besides, I don't think GC can measure it since it is not a volatile organic compound.
Yeah...The determination and quantification of extracted PHB polymer can can be carry out with spectrophotometric technique, i.e. UV- spectroscopy (crotonic acid assay method). This method based on the conversion of PHB to crotonic acid and subsequent spectrophotometric detection and quantification of this acid by taking the absorbance at 235 nm [Law and Slepecky, 1961; Complete reference: Law, J. H. and Slepecky, R. A. (1961) Assay of poly-β-hydroxybutyric acid. J. Bacteriol. 82, 33-36]. However, my question is how to differentiate/ determine and quantify the other PHA monomers such as short-chain-length (SCL) 3-hydroxyvalerate monomer, medium-chain-length (MCL) 3-hydroxyvalerate monomer etc. based on the spectrophotometric technique? Is there any advancement or improvement or development of novel spectrophotometric technique capable to solve the same queries?
Well, according to my understanding of above both papers of Law and Slepecky SCL / PHB can only converted to crotonic acid and hence not suitable for MCL. So for MCL methods like FTIR, GC-MS, (13)C, (1)H, and HSQC NMR spectroscopy are only so far reported as suitable.
Yeah, I agree too but as we known nothing is impossible so, in near future we can expect some novel spectrophotometric technique for qualitative and quantitative assay for MCL-PHA including SCL-3-hydroxyvaleric acid.
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