Advantages and limitations of pre-column derivatization of amino acids with dabsyl chloride

Abstract

This paper describes a procedure for the derivatization of amino acids using dabsyl chloride and the high-performance liquid chromatographic determination of the resulting dabsyl-amino acids. The dabsyl derivatives have a number of advantages over other derivatives, including a simple derivatization procedure, very good stability, good reproducibility and a good limit of detection for the method, complete high-performance liquid chromatographic separation of all the amino acids and specific detection at a wavelength in the visible region. The derivatization parameters were optimized to obtain a fast and practical detection method. The method presented here has been applied to a large number of different projects and an example is given for each application.