As a newcomer to the world of biochemistry I am finding it quite tough to pin down some of the details needed for the study that I will be doing for my dissertation.

I am currently thinking that I will be using Ion exchange chromatography for this study but I am unclear how to create good testable samples from the raw and cooked food samples that I will be analysing.

Any suggestions would be miraculous.

Thank you for any help you can offer.

Depends a lot on what you aim to extract. An individual protein, a selection of proteins or whole proteome? Also are they supposed to retain activity?

I really want to compare Amino Acid content between different meat samples, and see how cooking affects this. I want to avoid HPLC but am confused as to wether my sample just needs blending, diluting, hydrolysis, buffer or other treatments? And after ion exchange I am thinking post column OPA tagging for detection but am unsure what equipment is needed for this?

Does any of this actually make sense? :S

Ion exchange with post-column derivatization is pretty much standard, so it should work fine. It would be more or less a standard LC setup, though. Quantitative thinlayer chromatography is an alternative, but much less accurate.