Biochrom 30+ Amino Acid Analyzer Physiological system by Biochrom Ltd

"The Biochrom AAA still works competently. It is a legacy post column derivatisation technology about 60 years old and proven tried and true, has good precision, though low throughput. The software comes from Agilent, is dated and can be glitchy, but is tolerable. The problem I see with the equipment is that the current model 30+ is about 98% similar to the previous obsolete model 30 except for its newer autosampler. It is also almost the same as the first generation Biochrom 20. Over 20 years, mostly just an external color change made from white to white and purple and then to white and blue. Same internals, so the design is now quite old. The company has not made any significant improvements or modernization. It is still using a tungsten lamp source. The Biochrom reagents tend to be more expensive. It only does buffer step switching and cannot make any gradients like a Hitachi AAA. There are newer design classic post column Ninhydrine models out on the market which are better. There are two German companies seriously worth exploring, Sykam and MembraPure. Another problematic issue with the Biochrom is that there is considerable variation in the quality and performance of their analytical columns for quite many years and has not improved. All of these issues do cut in to the precision advantage in post column Ninhydrine, and so labs that need a higher throughput are moving to newer techniques such as pre-column derivatisation and also to LC-MS/MS. With LC-MS/MS, the instrumentation has a higher initial cost, but then the savings come from multiple years of not buying expensive buffers and Ninhydrine. The Biochrom was once the main workhorse of AAA, but as the years advance and company have stood still, I would recommend looking at the newer designed Ninhydrine AAA models or perhaps an LC-MS/MS solution, which is 8 to 10 times faster."