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From 2012.igem.org

Bad meat volatiles

With Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry one can separate and identify different volatiles present in meat that is starting to spoil. We thought that the identification of these volatiles by GC-MS would point out exactly what compounds influence the behavior of our identified promoters [Link to identification page], but we were surprised by the outcome…

The University of Groningen has a lot of GC-MS equipment available and a large commercial database with compounds that we could use to identify the substrates we found in the GC-MS data. So far so good. However, one of the drawbacks of the GC-MS is that the compounds that we might identify from meat that starts to spoil, will be destroyed during the measurements. No further analysis of these compounds is possible then. But if the GC-MS measurements succeed, reliable qualitative data is obtained. These data are hard to analyze due to the large diversity of the volatiles present.

Picture: Arjan and Tom at work with the GC-MS.>br>