Capillary Gas Chromatographic Analysis of Protein and Nonprotein Amino Acids in Biological Samples

Gas chromatography (GC) has been widely utilized for amino acid analysis because of its inherent advantages of high resolving power, high sensitivity, simplicity, and low cost. However, the main problem is the necessity to derivatize the amino acids into less polar and more volatile compounds. Therefore, not only the development of GC systems, but also the concomitant development of suitable derivatives are important factors to accomplish satisfactory GC analysis. An enormous number of approaches for the preparation of volatile derivatives suitable for quantitative analysis of protein and nonprotein amino acids has been reported.