“…One of the most widely used fluorescent derivatization agents for primary and secondary amines in the biochemical fields is fluorescein isothiocyanate isomer I (FITC; Shintani and Polansky, 1997;Yu and Dovichi, 1989), which was first used for CE in 1988 (Cheng and Dovichi, 1988). Different CE-LIF determinations have been found in the literature using FITC as precolumn derivatization reagent to determine polyamines (Mattusch et al, 1995), biogenic amines (Nouadje et al, 1995a(Nouadje et al, ,b, 1996(Nouadje et al, , 1997Paez et al, 1996;Rodríguez et al, 1996) or some aliphatic amines in water samples (Brumley and Kelliher, 1997 We report here the separation and determination of the biogenic amine serotonin by CE-LIF prior to fluorescent derivatization reaction with FITC which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first report of derivatization of the amine to carry out fluorescent detection in capillary electrophoresis. Previous works dealing with CE demonstrate that serotonin can be analysed by this technique using other detection procedures such as electrochemical detection (Chen et al, 2001) or indirect chemiluminescence (Tsai and Whang, 1999).…”