"Which still leaves the question, why can't I find any work regarding tryptophan in pollen samples?"
Analysis of individual amino acids in proteins involves breaking the protein down. Typically it is broken down by boiling in acid. Breaking the protein down releases the individual amino acids so each can be analyzed as an individual. The tryptophan problem is this acid treatment destroys tryptophan so it simply is not present in the solution to be analyzed. Alternatively an alkaline treatment can be used but this also partly breaks down tryptophan. That leaves difficult and expensive alternate ways to do the analysis. These are difficult and expensive enough that they are not often performed.
It would certainly be possible to analyze pollen for tryptophan. But someone is going to have to cough up a decent hunk of money to get the data. As an off the top guess I would say maybe $25,000 for 25 pollen samples and I probably am a bunch low on cost. You do not save any money by doing fewer samples as the cost is going to be in set up and validation.
Dick
" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner." Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists. "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong." H. L. Mencken
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