Analysis of amino acid neurotransmitters from rat and mouse spinal cords by liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection

•Simultaneous analysis of glutamic acid, glycine, taurine and γ-aminobutyric acid in rat and mouse spinal cord tissue was performed.•Fast and simple sample treatments were applied.•RP-LC-FL analyses were performed in less than 15min.•The method was fully validated and would be of interest for clinical laboratories and investigators. A RP-LC-FL detection method has been developed to identify and quantitate four amino acid neurotransmitters including glutamic acid, glycine, taurine and γ-aminobutyric acid in rat and mouse spinal cord tissue. 3-(4-carboxybenzoyl)-2-quinolinecarboxaldehyde (CBQCA) was employed for the derivatization of these neurotransmitters prior to RP-LC-FL analysis. Different parameters which influenced separation and derivatization were optimized. Under optimum conditions, linearity was achieved within the concentration ranges of 0.50–50.00μM for all analytes with correlation coefficients from 0.9912 to 0.9997. The LODs ranged from 0.03μM to 0.06μM. The proposed method has been successfully applied to the determination of amino acid neurotransmitters in biological samples such as rat and mouse spinal cord with satisfactory recoveries.