The development of methods for rapid and sensitive determination of neurotransmitters and their precursors and/or metabolites has been a challenging goal for many years since they provide valuable information for disposition dynamics rather than the static levels of neurotransmitters. Acetylcholine (ACh), a main neurotransmitter in both the peripheral and central nervous systems, is found in mammalian brain tissues. Despite intensive research, the roles of neurotransmitters in the central nervous system are much less delineated, although it is generally considered that ACh is involved in temperature and blood pressure regulation, motor coordination, learning, memory, etc.1 Furthermore, ACh and choline (Ch) levels in the brain are very important due to the significant role in the neuropsychiatric diseases; 2-6 Ch serves both as the precursor and metabolite of ACh.Numerous chromatographic methods have been described for the simultaneous measurement of Ch and ACh. Though high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with MS or with tandem MS required minimal sample preparation and no derivatization, it had relatively inadequate quantitation limits 9-12 HPLC-electrochemical detection (ECD) with immobilized acetylcholinesterase (EC 3.1.1.7, AChE) and Ch oxidase (EC 1.1.3.7, ChOx) reactors as column reactor 13,14 or with coimmobilized AChE/ChOx bienzyme electrode 15 were suited for the sensitive determinations of Ch and ACh; the detection limits and sample throughput have been reported to be 1 and 3 nM for Ch and ACh, respectively, and 3/h. 15 The slower flow rate is preferable to the conversion efficencies for the analytes to H2O2 and to the sensitive detection of the H2O2, but the decreased sample throughput is undesirable to follow minutely the dynamics of ACh and Ch.For the rapid assays, though there have been many flow injection (FI) methods with immobilized ChOx or coimmobilized AChE/ChOx for the determination of Ch or ACh, 16-20 a split-steam FI system with chemiluminometric detection using three immobilized enzyme column reactors such as an immobilized ChOx, an immobilized catalase and a coimmobilized AChE/ChOx, and using ferricyanide-catalyzed luminol reaction have been developed for simultaneous determination of Ch and ACh.
21In a split-stream FI system with column reactors, generally, sample plugs from the reactors disperse into the carrier stream and are, moreover, diluted with the carrier solution from other streams; the resulting peak broadening causes lowering of sensitivity and sample throughput. Flow-through sensors based on the integration of conversion reaction and detection reaction in a flow cell have been designed to solve the problems. [22][23][24] We have recently proposed chemiluminometric biosensors for simultaneous determination of oxidase substrates on the basis of integration of oxidase reactions and peroxidase (POx)-catalyzed H2O2/luminol detection reactions, which involved no separation process. 25,26 This paper describes the performance of a rapid and sensitive flow-through sen...