See Clearly with Odin: A Fresh Look at Microbial Metabolism

Metabolic phenotypic analysis is a method for quantitatively assessing effects of genomic changes on the metabolism of microbes. Cells are grown under thousands of different substrates at once to produce a functional metabolic readout. In the presence of a reporter dye, cellular respiration can be measured and compared across strains, producing comprehensive metabolic profiles for each strain. Dye formation alone may not fully inform the metabolic profile since biomass changes throughout the experiment. In some cases, cellular growth and respiration are discordant, so a method to determine both is required. Here we’ll introduce new methods and instrumentation that enable reporting on growth and respiration simultaneously, as well as demonstrate the benefits of kinetically measuring these parameters to create a more accurate metabolic profile.