I want to check the quantity or presence of EPA and DHA in algal Lipids. Is there any other technique than Gas chromatography for that purpose.
GC is the most accurate, perfect and popularly used technique for fatty acids quantification. You may try HPLC.
@Abd El-Fatah Abomohra, Thank you for your response sir but I am looking for any colorimetric technique that can be performed more often and be economical.
Thank you
It seems to me that the use of GC is unavoidable in the case of biological fatty acid mixture separation.
Is there any other method to differentiate regioisomeric acids - omega-3-C22:5 and omega-6-C22:5, for example, or omega-3-C20:5 and omega-6-C20:5? Even HPLC is not efficient enouph although it can separate rather complicated mixtures of homologes, structural isomers and components with different number of double bonds. Perhaps the mimimal overall chromatogrophic efficency necessary to separate the mixture of 20-40 isomeric acids (usually observed in algae FA chromatogram) is close to 20000-30000 t.p.: capillary GC provides such parameters easily, but packed column GC and even HPLC can't do it (usual N values guaranteeredby this methods - 2000-5000 t.p.).
Photometric or colorimetric method may be useful at the stage of technological quality conrol during DHA production (provided method is used to estimate acid content in DHA rich and concentrated preparation - for example, containing 30-40 % w/w of DHA). But, as a rule, analytical method is selected to assure correct values of component concentrations in ANY POSSIBLE case and any possible sample - including the objects with low EPA and DHA content, with very high polyunsaturared impurity content and so on. Apparently capillary GC is the only method of choise.
GC or GC-MS will give accurate result. But you can try HPLC but the result will vary according to running solvents and lipid dissolving solvents. For HPLC also need to make standard curve by using standard (different concentration). HPLC is time consuming. You can also try LC-MS/MS (Q-TOF) but it is expensive.
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