Metabolism and microgenerator of carbon-13 dioxide

CO2 can be produced by a lot of metabolic reactions and is the end point of numerous metabolisms. The high performances of continuous flow ratio mass spectrometry (CF-IRMS) allow measuring very low levels of C-13 enrichment from very-small analytical samples. These CO2 microgenerator technology can be used in a lot of biological protocols, this paper presents the inverse isotopic dilution method used for the determination of C-13 from CO2 generated by cells ( poly-morpho nuclear cells) or microorganisms. The determination of amino acids using the (CO2)-C-13, generated by the reaction with ninhydrin from micro samples is also presented. These examples show that microgenerators of CO2 can be used for the study of a lot of biological or chemical systems in so far as they can produce CO2.