Rapid Simultaneous Determination of Organic Acids, Free Amino Acids, and Lactose in Cheese by Capillary Electrophoresis

Abstract

A capillary electrophoresis (CE) method for the simultaneous separation of 11 metabolically important organic acids (oxalic, formic, citric, succinic, orotic, uric, acetic, pyruvic, propionic, lactic, and butyric), 10 amino acids (Asp, Glu, Tyr, Gly, Ala, Ser, Leu, Phe, Lys, and Trp), and lactose has been optimized, validated, and tested in dairy products. Repeatability and linearity were calculated for each compound, with detection limit values as low as 0.2·10−2 mM for citric acid and Gly. The method was applied to analyze yogurt and different varieties of commercial cheeses. This method yielded specific CE patterns for different varieties of cheese. Also, it has been shown to be sensitive enough to measure small changes in composition of some of those compounds in fresh cheese stored under accelerated ripening conditions for 2 d at 32°C (e.g., from 1728.3±45.0 to 1166.7±4.5 mg/100g of DM in the case of lactose, or from 23.5±0.6 to 76.8±16.7 mg/100g of DM in the case of acetic acid).