As a biochemist this thing where people are popping up to say they've got five pounds of citric acid or a pound of glutamic acid on hand makes me feel all warm and happy.
one day we may actually do something with the sack of Rochelle salt we bought a couple years ago ~Alyx
Back in the day one of the things I did was measure amino acids with an instrument with the descriptive name "amino acid analyzer," and one of the issues we always had was that there was glycine contaminating everything in the world so you always got a higher glycine reading than you'd expect.
Another thing I did was run SDS-polyacrylamide gels with the good old tris-glycine buffer system. So we had a gigantic plastic tub containing a bunch of kilograms of glycine, which now and then I would have to open up to scoop out some glycine. And every time I did I'd look over at the amino acid analyzer and think, well, this isn't helping the glycine background.
