Quantitative Autoradiography of Monoamine Uptake Sites and Receptors in Rat and Mouse Brain

In the last twenty years, the availabihty of radioactively labeled compounds that bind with high affinity and selectivity to pharmacological receptors has enabled the direct measurement of such binding sites. After initial studies, carried out with tissue homogenates, membrane preparations, or synaptosomal preparations, it became obvious that the distribution of many of these receptors was not homogenous within the brain, and more refined methods were developed to establish their distribution in the central nervous system (CNS). One early improvement implemented for receptor topology studies was to carry out homogenate binding assays with small samples microdissected from discrete brain regions.