Taurine concentration in the brain and in the plasma following intraperitoneal injections

Summary. The effect of different taurine doses (0.050, 0.125, 0.250, 0.500 and 1.000 g/kg) administered intraperitoneally to Wistar rats was studied in both the plasma and the hippocampal microdialysate content. The samples were analyzed by reverse phased HPLC for the microdialysate samples and by HPLC with ion-exchange post-column derivatization (ninhydrin) for the plasma samples. In both plasma and microdialysate, we observed a dose dependent increase of taurine concentration. The AUC curves obtained from both microdialysate and plasma samples showed that the increase of taurine concentrations were linear. The mean ratio between AUC's microdialysate and plasma was 1.63+/-0.21 showing thus an unbalance between plasma and brain taurine content; a mechanism which enhance taurine transfer from the plasma to the brain was assumed.