Occasionally, I work with lauryl tryptose broth for growing coliform. Being a chemical engineer, I suspected at the start that tryptose is a type of carbohydrate because of the -ose syffix. However, a search for more info on the web did not provide even a hint of what tryptose really is. Anybody there who knows what tryptose is? I'm particularly interested in its molecular structure.
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3 Answers
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Tryptose is not a single compound, therefore it does not have a unique molecular structure. As you are aware, tryptose is a nutrient broth used for growing coliform. It is a mixture of smaller proteins produced by using trypsine as the enzyme to digest larger proteins. You might compare it to tryptone which also uses the enzyme trypsine in the digesting process, but only casein is digested. There is also peptone which uses a mixture of pankreatin and papain to enzymatically digest proteins.
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Tryptose is not a sugar or any particular compound, so there is no corresponding molecular structure.
Tryptose is an animal-derived mixture that includes water soluble peptides.
http://www.bdbiosciences.com/documents/Tryptose.pdf
http://www.bd.com/ds/technicalCenter/brochures/br_1_222880_academia.pdf
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Thanks guys. After nine months of wondering, i now realise that tryptose is not a carbohydrate but a mixture of polypeptides (or [nonfunctional] proteins?) of varying length (about 2 to 80 or so, which i estimated using the molecular weight distribution chart from the Bacto Tryptose pdf and using a rough average of 120Da for the amino acids).