Quantitative determination of protein of bacterial origin on the basis ofd-aspartic acid andd-glutamic acid content

Summary In recent decades several methods have been developed for determination of the proportion of nitrogen-containing substances passed from the rumen into the abomasum, or small intestine, which are of microbial origin. Recently, when examining thed-amino acid content of foodstuffs, particularly milk and milk products, it was observed that, in addition tod-alanine (d-Ala,d-glutamic acid (d-Glu) andd-aspartic acid (d-Asp) can also be detected in similar quantities, primarily in products which have links with bacterial activity. This gave rise to the idea of examining the diaminopimelic acid (DAPA),d-Glu, andd-Asp content of bacteria extracted from the rumen of cattle, and that of chyme from the same cattle, to establish whetherd-Asp andd-Glu can be used to estimate protein of bacterial origin. The investigations performed have provided evidence that bothd-Asp andd-Glu might be appropriate for determination of protein of bacterial origin. The results obtained using these two bacterial markers (d-Asp andd-Glu) proved to the approximately 10% lower than those obtained using DAPA; this was not because of to error attributable to the new markers but rather to the unreliability of determination using DAPA Analyses performed on samples of known bacterial protein content indicate thatd-Asp andd-Glu gave almost identical results for bacterial protein content which were very close to the theoretical (calculated) values. Presented at Balaton Symposium '01 on High-Performance Separation Methods, Siófok, Hungary, September 2–4, 2001.