[Determination of free amino acids in the pork and its broth cooked by different methods using reversed-phase high...

A reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatographic (RP-HPLC) method was developed for the determination of 17 amino acids in the pork and its broth cooked by different methods. 6-Aminoquinolyl-N-hydroxyl-succinimidyl-carbamate (AQC) was used as pre-column derivatization reagent. In the RP-HPLC method, a Nova-Pak C18 column was used with the dilution of AccQ x Tag Eluent A, acetonitrile and water as the mobile phases in a gradient elution mode. The 17 amino acids were baseline separated within 47 min with ultraviolet (UV) detection at 248 nm. Each amino acid showed good linearity in the range of 1 - 100 micromol/L except cystine (Cys2 ) in the range of 0. 5 - 50 micromol/L with the correlation coefficient (r2) more than 0. 99. The detection limits (S/N = 3) of 17 amino acids were ranged from 0. 29 to 0.96 micromol/L, and the spiked recoveries in a cooked broth sample were from 86. 5% to 101.0%. The results showed that the proposed method can be applied to determine amino acids for meat quality assessment and process optimization with simple pretreatment and good separation.