Study of pulse generation technique for serial dual electrode detection of amino acids and proteins in flow injection analysis

Abstract

A new analytical procedure using a serial dual electrode detector was developed for the analysis of amino acids and proteins. Bromine was generated at the upstream electrode and detected by the downstream electrode. The presence of amino acids and proteins was shown to lower the downstream current but with no apparent effect on the upstream current. This indirect mode of detection can be applied to the determination of amino acids and proteins which are electrochemically inactive or too large to be accessible to the electrode surface for electron exchange. The method is shown capable to determine various amino acids (cystine, tyrosine, lysine, tryptophan, glycine, methionine and arginine) and proteins (cytochrome c, hemoglobin, HAS, a-Amylase, Conalbumin I, Catalase and Myglobin) with linear working range for amino acids between 10^(-6) to 10^(-3) M and total proteins between 10^(-7) to 10^(-3) M. The method has been applied for the analysis of amino acids and total protein in food using Flow Injection Analysis with results obtained comparable to those using the traditional analytical procedure. Use of pulse generation technique was shown to produce a more stable flow injection analysis peaks for repetitive determination than the use of conventional constant current method which showed increase of the background current after determination over 200 minutes. The pulse method was found to give stable baseline even after 400 minutes. Thus, the method is shown able to provide a suitable analytical procedure for automatic analysis of amino acids and proteins in food by flow injection analysis.