The 3-carbon compound malonaldehyde (MDA) is a major carbonyl decomposition products of autoxidized, polyunsaturated lipid materials (Tamura et al. 1991, Crawford et al. 1966, Pegg et al. 1992). Spectrophotometric detection of the malonaldehyde-thiobarbutiric acid (TBA) complex has been widely used for measuring lipid oxidation in food and biological tissues (Kwon and Veen 1968, Esterbauer and Cheseeman 1990). The basic principle of the method is thereaction of 1 molecule malonaldehyde and 2 molecules TBA to form a pink pigment malonaldehyde-TBA complex, which can be quantitated spectrophotometrically (Gutteridge 1981).
The tissue distillation-TBA assay method of Tarladgis et al. (1960) is most commonly used and may be regarded as the standard method for MDA analysis. However, the main disadvantage of the distillation method is that distillation is an experimental procedure requiring the collection of a specified volume of the distillate. So it needs more time than the aqueous acid extraction method (Botsoglu et al. 1994) and the