Method for Determining Organic Compound Concentration in Biological Systems by Permanganate Redox Titration

An effective express method of determining organic compound concentration in biological systems (soil water extracts, culture liquid etc.) is developed. The method is based on the permanganate redox titration of carbon-containing sample in an acidic medium (pH ≈ 0) at temperature of 100°C. On the example of basic microbial metabolism of monosaccharides, alcohols, organic acids, the suitability of the method for quantitative determination of total organic carbons is shown. The method measures the rate of glucose consumption by Escherichia coli 926 (ATCC 8789) in M9 medium. We created the average calibration curve for determining carbon concentration in multi-component biological samples. The permanganate method provides high accuracy results which are comparable with the widely used phenol-sulfuric acid method. The sensitivity of the method to carbon concentration is 25 mg/l.