Although system A is present at the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the physiological roles of system A have not been clarified. The efflux transport of the substrates of system A, such as L-proline (L-Pro), glycine (Gly), and ␣-methylaminoisobutyric acid (MeAIB), across the BBB was investigated using the in vivo Brain Efflux Index method. Over a period of 40 min, L 3 H]MeAIB uptake. In light of these observations, our results indicate that L-Pro and Gly are transported from the brain across the BBB, whereas MeAIB is retained in the brain. System A is involved in efflux transport for L-Pro at the BBB. The predominantly expressed ATA2 mRNA at the BBB may play a role in maintaining the concentration of small neutral amino acids and cerebral osmotic pressure in the brain under pathological conditions.The blood-brain barrier (BBB), which is formed by complex tight junctions of the brain capillary endothelial cells, segregates the circulating blood from interstitial fluid in the brain (Cornford, 1985). The BBB is well known to regulate not only the supply of nutrients and drugs to the brain from the circulating blood (Cornford, 1985;Pardridge et al., 1990), but also the efflux transport of compounds, such as P-glycoprotein, which transports anticancer and other drugs (Tsuji et al., 1992;Schinkel et al., 1994). Another transporter at the BBB is system A, a transporter of small neutral amino acids, which accepts L-alanine, L-proline, glycine, and ␣-methylaminoisobutyric acid (MeAIB) as substrates. It has been suggested that system A is present in the abluminal (brain) side of the BBB because MeAIB, which is a specific nonmetabolizable substrate for system A (Norman and Mann, 1986), is taken up in an Na ϩ -dependent manner from the brain side using isolated rat brain capillaries (Betz and Goldstein, 1978) and isolated abluminal membrane vesicles from bovine brain endothelial cells (Sanchez del Pino et al., 1995). Several investigations using brain-uptake methods have established that system A substrates undergo limited influx transport across the BBB (Oldendorf, 1971;Sershen and Lajtha, 1979). These investigations suggest that system A plays a role in the efflux transport of small neutral amino acids at the BBB to maintain their concentration in the brain (Betz and Goldstein, 1978). However, it does not fully explain this hypothesis, because the neutral amino acids are believed to be supplied from the circulating blood (Cornford, 1985). ReThis work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, Japan. It was also supported in part by the Suzuken Memorial Foundation, the Mochida Memorial Foundation for Medical and Pharmaceutical Research, the Uehara Memorial Foundation, the Novartis Foundation (Japan) for the Promotion of Science, the Nakatomi Foundation, the Japan Society