Determination of Biogenic Amines in Digesta by High Performance Liquid Chromatography with Precolumn Dansylation

A rapid high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the determination of nine biogenic amines in digesta sample from pig cecum and colon was developed using a simple direct derivatization with dansyl chloride. After precipitation with trichloroacetic acid and extraction by n-hexane, the amines were separated on a C18 column using a water–acetonitrile gradient elution program. The calibration curve for each amine was linear over the range of 50 to 250 µmol/L, and the relative standard deviation for intra-assay precision was below 0.5%. The recovery ranged from 86.79% to 117.62% while the limit of detection was 0.1 µmol/L for the amines except for spermine with a value of 0.03 µmol/L. This procedure was successfully applied to identify and quantify biogenic amines in the hindgut digesta of the pig.