Determination of anti-oxidative histidine dipeptides in poultry by microchip capillary electrophoresis with contactless conductivity detection

•The use of a simple and inexpensive home-made microchip electrophoresis device.•The first use of C4D detection to determine carnosine and anserine.•Chemical derivatization of the samples was not required. A home-made microchip electrophoresis (MCE) device was used to quantitate two biologically important histidine dipeptides, carnosine and anserine, using capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (C4D), at pH 2.7. The C4D detector exhibited a linear response to both carnosine and anserine in the range of 0–200μM for the individual dipeptides and in the range of 0–100μM for each dipeptide when both were present as a mixture. The limit of detections (LOD) for the dipeptides in the mixture were 0.10μM for carnosine and 0.16μM for anserine. Standard addition was used to detemine the accuracy of the method. For carnosine and anserine the recoveries were in the range of 96.7±4.9–106.0±7.5% and 95.3±4.5–105.0±5.1% in thigh muscle and 97.5±5.1–105.0±7.5% and 95.3±5.4–97.3±5.6% in breast muscle, respectively.