title: Liquid chromatographic determination of free serotonin in human plasma.
abstract: The complex background of interfering substances makes plasma pretreatment necessary before performing liquid-chromatographic quantitation of circulating serotonin. We compared two isolation procedures (extraction into butanol and isolation on a weak cation-exchange resin) before chromatography for measuring free serotonin from human plasma. Sensitivity, specificity and recovery were all evaluated. The cation-exchange resin yielded chromatograms with no interfering peaks, was cheaper and took less processing time than butanol extraction. We conclude that the clean-up of human plasma by a cation-exchange resin is suitable and accurate for routine liquid-chromatographic determination of circulating serotonin.
mesh_terms: D002853:Chromatography, Liquid / Q000379:methods; D004563:Electrochemistry; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D012701:Serotonin / Q000097:blood*
chemical_list: D012701:Serotonin