Ever wonder about the purity of the antibiotics you are using in your research? Most antibiotics are actually mixtures containing one or two major compounds but the rest could be related compounds or impurities. Fermentation-derived antibiotics have more variability and have more complex impurity profiles. The impurity profile depends on the manufacturing process, and even for the same strain of a bacteria, the impurity profiles could be different. Related compounds that are not defined as components of the active substance are considered related impurities. Impurities could come into play from a variety of sources such as starting materials, filtration aids, salts, excipients, solvents, catalysts, intermediates, by-products, or residuals. Additionally, as the compounds degrade, there could be impurities related to their degradation. Even as the antibiotic sits on the shelf, the elements such as light, heat and moisture can lead to impurities.
Antibiotics are used to prevent contamination in cell culture, such as mammalian cell lines that could be used to express proteins such as antibodies, and these cell lines are maintained using culture media containing antibiotics. Antibiotics are also used as gene selection agents to verify that the gene of interest has been inserted. For effective selection pressure, your selection agent should be highly pure and work consistently.
It is estimated that there are more than 70,000 natural antibiotics. Given the sheer number of these compounds there has been limited studies looking at how these impurities could impact bacterial growth or impact the development of antibiotic resistance.
Our EvoPure® products have been carefully developed using chemical separation methods to produce highly purified single compounds. Since they are fully characterized by spectral analysis, you can be confident in their composition. They are commonly used as analytical reference standards in research applications, impurity profiling, and upstream biopharma product manufacturing.
References
Pauter K, Szultka-Mlynska M and Buszewski B (2020) Determination and identification of antibiotic drugs and bacterial strains in biological samples.Molecules 25(11):2556 Link.
Pounikar AR, Umekar MJ and Gupta KR (2020) Genotoxic impurities: An important regulatory aspect. Asian J. Pharma. Clin. Res. 13(6):1-16 Link.