Modeling microbial ethanol production by E. coli under aerobic/anaerobic conditions: Applicability to real postmortem cases and to postmortem blood derived microbial cultures

Abstract

The mathematical modeling of the microbial ethanol production under strict anaerobic experimental conditions for some bacterial species has been proposed by our research group as the first approximation to the quantification of the microbial ethanol production in cases where other alcohols were produced simultaneously with ethanol.The present study aims to: (i) study the microbial ethanol production by Escherichia coli under controlled aerobic/anaerobic conditions; (ii) model the correlation between the microbial produced ethanol and the other higher alcohols; and (iii) test their applicability in: (a) real postmortem cases that had positive BACs (>0.10g/L) and co-detection of higher alcohols and 1-butanol during the original ethanol analysis and (b) postmortem blood derived microbial cultures under aerobic/anaerobic controlled experimental conditions.The statistical evaluation of the results revealed that the formulated models were presumably correlated to 1-propanol and 1-butanol which were recognized as the most significant descriptors of the modeling process. The significance of 1-propanol and 1-butanol as descriptors was so powerful that they could be used as the only independent variables to create a simple and satisfactory model. The current models showed a potential for application to estimate microbial ethanol – within an acceptable standard error – in various tested cases where ethanol and other alcohols have been produced from different microbes.