Evaluation of physiological amino acids profiling by tandem mass spectrometry.

Background: Nowadays, the most conventional method to quantify physiological amino acids consists in ion exchange chromatography (IEC) followed by post-column ninhydrin derivatization and UV detection at two wavelengths. Unfortunately, the technique presents some drawbacks such as long run time, large sample volume, and specific costs associated to the maintenance of a dedicated instrument. Therefore, we aimed to switch towards a mass spectrometry approach.