Hot isopropanol quenching procedure for automated microtiter plate scale (13)C-labeling experiments

BACKGROUND: Currently, the generation of genetic diversity for microbial cell factories outpaces the screening of strain variants with omics-based phenotyping methods. Especially isotopic labeling experiments, which constitute techniques aimed at elucidating cellular phenotypes and supporting rational strain design by growing microorganisms on substrates enriched with heavy isotopes, suffer from comparably low throughput and the high cost of labeled substrates. RESULTS: We present a miniaturized, parallelized, and automated approach to (13)C-isotopic labeling experiments by establishing and validating a hot isopropanol quenching method on a robotic platform coupled with a microbioreactor cultivation system. This allows for the first time to conduct automated labeling experiments at a microtiter plate scale in up to 48 parallel batches. A further innovation enabled by the automated quenching method is the analysis of free amino acids instead of proteinogenic ones on said microliter scale. Capitalizing on the latter point and as a proof of concept, we present an isotopically instationary labeling experiment in Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032, generating dynamic labeling data of free amino acids in the process. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that a robotic liquid handler is sufficiently fast to generate informative isotopically transient labeling data. Furthermore, the amount of biomass obtained from a sub-milliliter cultivation in a microbioreactor is adequate for the detection of labeling patterns of free amino acids. Combining the innovations presented in this study, isotopically stationary and instationary automated labeling experiments can be conducted, thus fulfilling the prerequisites for (13)C-metabolic flux analyses in high-throughput. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12934-022-01806-4.