Flow-injection spectrophotometric determination of lysine in feed samples

Abstract A flow-injection spectrophotometric method is described for the determination of lysine, based on the product of the reaction between lysine and 1,2-naphthoquinone-4-sulphonate in basic medium. The influence of different physical, chemical and hydrodynamic parameters on absorbance were studied. At 480 nm, the response is linear up to 1.5 × 10 −4 M, the detection limit is 1.9 × 10 −6 M and the relative standard deviation is 0.8%. Sample throughtput is 80 h −1 . The method was applied to the determination of free lysine in commercial feed samples, by means of multivariate calibration techniques, without the need of chromatographic separation. Good concordance is shown between this method and the standard procedure for amino acid analysis.