Determination of the specific activity of sheep plasma amino acids using high-performance liquid chromatography: comparison study between liquid scintillation counter and on-line flow-through detector.

A method was developed for the determination of the specific activities of leucine and phenylalanine in plasma using a flow-through scintillation counter coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography components. Results were compared with those obtained from liquid scintillation counting. Differences in the specific activities of leucine and phenylalanine between the two methods were not statistically significant. We concluded that flow-through radioactivity detection can be used for quantitative amino acid assays. However, the minimum activity that can be detected may be prohibitively low in certain applications.