removed and allowed to cool to room temperature the tubes 101 were then removed and their contents evaporated to dryness by means of the speed vac concentrator the resulting residues were dissolved in 100 u03bcl of sample dilution buffer na s buffer beckman instruments inc fullerton calif 92634 which contains 4 nanomoles of norleucine to act as an internal standard then 50 82 l aliquots of each sample was analyzed specifically the amino acid compositions of each hydrolyzed sample were determined with a 6300 beckman aminoacid ninhydrin analyzer the results of the analysis are shown in table 1 further table 1 shows published values for glucagon std which were obtained using the conventional hirs et al method of protein hydrolysis published standard std values for proteins used in the examples described herein can be found in the atlas of protein sequence and structure volume 5 pages 208 319 1972 and volume 5 supplement 2 page 267 1976 this example 1 demonstrates that a small protein i e protein having a molecular weight less than or equal to 10 000 is hydrolyzed effectively by the present invention this example 1 shows that the recovered residues per mole or alternatively the recovered number of molecules of the amino acid per the number of molecules of the protein in the sample for each constituent amino acid including labile amino acids i e thr ser met and his are within a standard deviation dev of plus or minus.