Determination of lysine content based on an in situ pretreatment and headspace gas chromatographic measurement technique.

This work reports on a simple method for the determination of lysine content by an in situ sample pretreatment and headspace gas chromatographic measurement (HS-GC) technique, based on carbon dioxide (CO) formation from the pretreatment reaction (between lysine and ninhydrin solution) in a closed vial. It was observed that complete lysine conversion to CO could be achieved within 60 min at 60 °C in a phosphate buffer medium (pH = 4.0), with a minimum molar ratio of ninhydrin/lysine of 16. The results showed that the method had a good precision (RSD < 5.23%) and accuracy (within 6.80%), compared to the results measured by a reference method (ninhydrin spectroscopic method). Due to the feature of in situ sample pretreatment and headspace measurement, the present method becomes very simple and particularly suitable to be used for batch sample analysis in lysine-related research and applications. Graphical abstract The flow path of the reaction and HS-GC measurement for the lysine analysis.