A simple, sensitive and reproducible microanalysis of noradrenaline and dopamine in the rat brain by high performance liquid chromatography with fluorometric detection by the o-phthalaldehyde (OPA) method is described. At the picomoler level, the recovery of catecholamines from the alumina column as the clean up procedure was 77.8±4.0% for noradrenaline, 61.0±2.9% for dopamine and 72.8±2.9% for 3, 4-dihydroxybenzylamine (DHBA) as an internal standard (mean ±SD, n=10). The variation coefficients of reproducibility of the present analytical method (total of clean up, separation and detection method) were 4.3 % for noradrenaline and 3.0 % for dopamine of the rat brain. The detectable limits of this method were 10 picomoles for noradrenaline and 20 picomoles for dopamine which corresponded to 1.7 ng and 3 ng, respectively. Catecholamine contents of the whole rat brain with present method were 2.027 ±0.234 nmol/g wet tissue for noradrenaline and 4.333±0.365 nmol/g wet tissue for dopamine (mean ±SD, n=5).