Flow injection analysis system for the supervision of industrial chromatographic downstream processing in biotechnology.

Sugar beet molasses is a natural resource for various products used in daily life, ranging from sucrose to amino acids for pharmaceutical industry. The separation of molasses into these high value components is performed on a large scale by ion exchange/exclusion chromatography. A biosensor system was set up for the "in time" analysis of serine and sucrose during molasses desugarisation. D-Serine was analysed with the multi-enzyme system D-serine dehydratase/lactic dehydrogenase and photometric detection of the NADH consumed. Sucrose was determined with invertase/mutarotase/glucose oxidase and the oxygen consumed was monitored amperometrically. An analysis could be performed within 2-5 min by directly injecting samples from the chromatographic process into the flow injection analysis system. The determination range for the sucrose analysis was 0-2.5 gl-1 and for the analysis of D-serine 0-0.5 gl-1. The standard deviation for the measurement of D-serine was 1.7%.