Analysis service

Amino acid analysis

Ansynth Service is specialized in classical ion-exchange amino acid analysis to detect deficiencies of essential amino acids in all kinds of food and feed.

In food and feed products

Since the discovery of mad cow disease and BSE problems at the end of the 90-ties, it is not allowed to use animal meal for the production of feed and food stuff. However the vegetable material to produce feed and food stuff might be essential amino acid deficient:

Ansynth Service is specialized in classical ion-exchange amino acid analysis to detect deficiencies of essential amino acids in all kinds of vegetable material. For this reason we routinely perform amino acid analysis for feed and food companies. Where necessary we can first assess the purity of synthetic amino acids like lysine, threonine, methionine and tryptophan, which are to be used as supplements to vegetable material to produce nourishing feed and food.

Finally we check the total content of these originally deficient amino acids in the feed and food end product.

In order to perform the assessments necessary Ansynth Service developed special methods to estimate amino acids in feed and food products, e.g.:

• The presence of added free methionine in feed and food products might give problems if the methionine in proteins is routinely oxidized to methionine sulphone, which is stable to acid hydrolysis. Methionine can then after acid hydrolysis be estimated as methionine sulphone. A part of the added free methionine however will decompose by the oxidation reaction. So we adapted our method to avoid this problem
• Tryptophan is acid labile. Therefore free tryptophan is estimated by HPLC. To measure total tryptophan we perform an alkaline hydrolysis

With our classical ion-exchange amino acid analysis with ninhydrin detection we follow USP and Ph.Eur. methods, and EU Commission Directives.

Type of samples

Basically any type of sample that contains amino acids and peptides or proteins can be managed, such as: