ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s it was already evident that high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) could become a major technique for the determination of tissue and body fluid levels of catecholamines, indole amines, and their metabolites. The rapid growth of HPLC as a convenient research method in neurochemistry promised to overshadow other sensitive analytical techniques such as speetrofluorescence, gas chromatography (GC), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and radiochemical assays. The relatively large number of reports on HPLC procedures for the determination of neurotransmitters and metabolites up to 1982 have been covered in several reviews. The electrochemical (EC) detector, now the most widely used detection system for the HPLC of neurotransmitters, is very sensitive to changes in the conductivity of the mobile phase. The dual EC detectors simultaneously monitor oxidative and/or reductive processes occurring at two different potentials. Fluorescence detection can be very selective and sensitive, but in the field of neurochemistry it is not as widely used as the GC detectors.
