Glutathione is the major cellular thiol present in mammalian cells and is critical for maintenance of redox homeostasis. However, current assay systems for glutathione lack application to intact animal tissues. To map the levels of glutathione in intact brain with cellular resolution (acute tissue slices and live animals), we have used two-photon imaging of monochlorobimane fluorescence, a selective enzyme-mediated marker for reduced glutathione. Previously, in vitro experiments using purified components and cultured glial cells attributed cellular monochlorobimane fluorescence to a glutathione S-transferase-dependent reaction with GSH. The tripeptide glutathione (GSH; ␥-L-glutamyl-L-cysteinylglycine) is the most abundant low molecular weight thiol in mammalian cells and constitutes a major cellular defense against reactive oxygen species. Deficiency in the GSH system has been linked to neuronal loss during progression of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson, Alzheimer, Huntington, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (1-3), as well as acute conditions such as spinal cord injury (4) and stroke (5-7). Although reactive oxygen species accumulation has been implicated in these disorders, examination of GSH levels in previous studies has largely been restricted to enzymatic assays and fluorescent probes that are only applicable in neuronal and glial cell cultures or brain homogenates. A widely used method for measuring GSH in cultured cells and tissue homogenates employs monochlorobimane (MCB) 4 (8), a normally nonfluorescent dye that when conjugated to reduced GSH by intracellular glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) forms adducts that can be measured fluorometrically. Recently, investigators have established that GSH in epidermal cells of intact Arabidopsis roots can be elegantly and quantitatively measured by two-photon laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM) with MCB (9). Accordingly, we now use a similar approach in intact mammalian brain to directly monitor GSH levels in different tissues.Data on GSH concentrations in different brain areas of various species obtained using chemical techniques have been summarized (10). However, because these results were derived from tissue homogenates, they only provide information on the average GSH content. It is also conceivable that other techniques such as thiol-reactive probes (11) may lack specificity for GSH or suffer from the disposition of thiols/ GSH changing in response to animal sacrifice and/or fixation. Furthermore, studies from cultured brain cells are potentially affected by media constituents that contain high levels of GSH precursors such as cystine, present at 100 M in minimal essential media but less than 1 mM in cerebrospinal fluid in vivo (12). Here we show that MCB is a specific probe for GSH labeling in brain tissues, and TPLSM can be used to image GSH content in various brain regions at the cellular level. In our assay, the extracellular environment contains a large reservoir of MCB (compared with intracellular GSH), and therefore the reaction between M...