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Corynebacterium glutamicum is intensively used for the industrial large-scale (fed-) batch production of amino acids, especially glutamate and lysine. However, metabolic flux analyses based on 13 C-labeling experiments of this organism have hitherto been restricted to small-scale batch conditions and carbon-limited chemostat cultures, and are therefore of questionable relevance for industrial fermentations. To lever flux analysis to the industrial level, a novel Sensor Reactor approach was developed (El Massaoudi et al., Metab. Eng., submitted), in which a 300-L production reactor and a 1-L Sensor Reactor are run in parallel master/slave modus, thus enabling 13 C-based metabolic flux analysis to generate a series of flux maps that document large-scale fermentation courses in detail. We describe the successful combination of this technology with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis, metabolite balancing methods and a mathematical description of 13 C-isotope labelings resulting in a powerful tool for quantitative pathway analysis during a batch fermentation. As a first application, 13 C-based metabolic flux analysis was performed on exponentially growing, lysine-producing C. glutamicum MH20-22B during three phases of a pilot-scale batch fermentation. By studying the growth, (co-) substrate consumption and (by-) product formation, the similarity of the fermentations in production and Sensor Reactor was verified. Applying a generally applicable mathematical model, which included metabolite and carbon labeling balances for the analysis of proteinogenic amino acid 13 C-isotopomer labeling data, the in vivo metabolic flux distribution was investigated during subsequent phases of exponential growth. It was shown for the first time that the in vivo reverse C 4 -decarboxylation flux at the anaplerotic node in C. glutamicum significantly decreased (70%) in parallel with threefold increased lysine formation during the investigated subsequent phases of exponential growth.

(13)C-based metabolic flux analysis ((13)CMFA) is limited to smaller scale experiments due to very high costs of labeled substrates. We measured (13)C enrichment in proteinogenic amino acid hydrolyzates using gas chromatography-combustion-isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC-C-IRMS) from a series of parallel batch cultivations of Corynebacterium glutamicum utilizing mixtures of natural glucose and [1-(13)C] glucose, containing 0%, 0.5%, 1%, 2%, and 10% [1-(13)C] glucose. Decreasing the [1-(13)C] glucose content, kinetic isotope effects played an increasing role but could be corrected. From the corrected (13)C enrichments in vivo fluxes in the central metabolism were determined by numerical optimization. The obtained flux distribution was very similar to those obtained from parallel labeling experiments using conventional high labeling GC-MS method and to published results. The GC-C-IRMS-based method involving low labeling degree of expensive tracer substrate, e.g. 1%, is well suited for larger laboratory and industrial pilot scale fermentations.