Neurotransmitters are endogenous chemical messengers which play an important role in many of the brain functions, abnormal levels being correlated with physical, psychotic and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's disease. Therefore, their sensitive and robust detection is of great clinical significance. Electrochemical methods have been intensively used in the last decades for neurotransmitter detection, outclassing more complicated analytical techniques such as conventional spectrophotometry, chromatography, fluorescence, flow injection, and capillary electrophoresis. In this manuscript, the most successful and promising electrochemical enzyme-free and enzymatic sensors for neurotransmitter detection are reviewed. Focusing on the activity of worldwide researchers mainly during the last ten years (2010–2019), without pretending to be exhaustive, we present an overview of the progress made in sensing strategies during this time. Particular emphasis is placed on nanostructured-based sensors, which show a substantial improvement of the analytical performances. This review also examines the progress made in biosensors for neurotransmitter measurements in vitro, in vivo and ex vivo.

The physiological significance of determining glutathione (GSH) and its oxide form is obvious from their applications in clinical practices such as diagnostic experiments for diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and cancers. Such an important detemination still needs the development of certain experimental procedures that are easy, fast, and cheap enough to implement. These procedural advantages can be provided through electrochemical methods. Therefore, in this study, at the surface of a glassy carbon electrode (GCE), a composite of functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and formazon was used as a mediator to determine GSH electrochemically. The results indicated that this modified GCE is electrocatalytically very active for glutathione oxidation. Several techniques including cyclic voltammetry (CV), scanning electron microscopy, and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) were used to characterize the electrode. Also, such kinetic parameters as the charge transfer rate constant and the transfer coefficient were calculated. In optimized conditions, there was a linear relationships between the DPV peak current of GSH oxidation and GSH concentration in the ranges of 1.0-100.0 and 100.0-800.0 µM at pH 7.0. As for the detection limit, it was found to be 0.73 µM. Once put to practice, the devised method proved to be capable of measuring GSH in blood samples.