A Combined Experimental Green Flow-Injection Procedure and Computational Analysis to Determine Amino Acids

Aim: Methods of pollution reduction and human health protection would be more successful if the fields of green analytical chemistry and computational analysis could come together. This overlap would help to minimize, or even eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances. The goal of this study was to identify a way of further developing the fields of green analytical chemistry and computational analysis.

Place and Duration of Study: Misr International University, between April 2011 and November 2012.

Methodology: A single-line flow-injection (FIA) packed-reactor technique has been developed for the analysis of amino acids. Amino acids were injected into a flowing stream of distilled–deionized water, carried through the packed reactor of CuO followed by UV detection. The flow rate was 1.25 mL/min and the column temperature was ambient (25 °C). New mathematical models for correlations of the physicochemical parameters of the CuII-amino acid complexes with analytical parameters such as lower limit of detection (LOD), lower limit of quantitation (LOQ) as well as lower limit of linearity range (LL) and higher limit of linearity range (HL) were employed.

Results: The developed procedure can accommodate sample frequency of 60 sample/hrand a recovery% ranging from 98.800% to 100.260%. A good accordance was observed between the computed values of LOD, LOQ, LL and HL and the observed results.

Conclusion: An extremely simple environmentally friendly analytical procedure including packed-reactor FIA technique has been developed and evaluated for the routine quality control of amino acids. The developed method has excellent sensitivity and accuracy, as well as, it required relatively simple and inexpensive instrumentation. A good correlation between the computed values and the FIA results suggests that the mathematical models are reliable, and hence provide a theoretical basis for the determination of amino acids.