Rapid techniques for the examination of bacterial citrate synthases.

A method has been devised for evaluating easily and rapidly the effect of inhibitors on the activity of citrate synthase in situ in bacteria grown on agar plates. Additionally, considerable reduction in the size of the gel filtration column employed to estimate the molecular weight of citrate synthase enables such a determination to be made in a much shorter time. These two techniques make it much easier to exploit the properties of different bacterial citrate synthases as an additional taxonomic tool in bacteriological laboratories.