Quantitative Amino Acid Analysis

Quantitative amino acid analysis is an important tool for many scientific areas ranging from the characterization of recombinant proteins to the description of food proteins for nutritional assessment. Quantitative amino acid analysis is often overlooked in many laboratories due to the difficulties involved in obtaining reliable amino acid composition data. Fortunately, for protein chemists, the creation of protein chemistry core laboratories devoted mainly to protein sequence analysis and peptide synthesis has provided new instrumentation that yields the necessary precision. In addition, for food scientists, it has become clear that for the description of food proteins, the nitrogen content alone simply does not provide sufficient information about the nutritional adequacy of these proteins, and as a result, a growing number of nutrition laboratories are undertaking amino acid analysis. This unit describes the information that can be derived from quantitative amino acid analysis and gives examples of the calculations that are needed. Curr. Protoc. Protein Sci. 63:3.2.1-3.2.6. © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.