The Amino Acid Content of Sweat in Normal Adults

NTEREST in the clinical and biochemical I significance of the amino acid composition of body fluids dates from the monumentary work of Garr0d.l The vast amount of knowl-edge of the aminoacidurias? and, more recently, of the amino acid composition of blood and cerebrospinal fluid in various states of heredi-tary diseases far surpasses similar knowledge of the amino acid composition of sweat. This relative dearth of information in the literature clearly must be a reflection of the comparative ease with which uniform and adequate samples of fluid can be collected for analysis. Since the early microbiological assay study of the amino acid composition of sweat by Hier e t aL3 only four reports4- ' have de-scribed the amino acids of pure sweat using modern chromatographic technics. Other in-vestigators have been interested in the total nitrogen8 and atnino acid c o m p o s i t i ~ n ~- ~ ~ of wipings and water rinsings of skin, rather than freshly secreted sweat. The data recorded until now have been accumulated to point up the normal range of values3p4J and the con-tribution of cutaneous nitrogen loss to the total nitrogen balance,'jV8 as well as to the study of skin disease^.^-^ ^ In the only report con