Waters pump

The precursor of [¹¹C]-TKF, 4-(6-(2-fluoroethoxy)quinolin-2-yl)aniline (THKF-2), was synthesized by our research group [20 (link),21 (link)]. Triflate-Ag was purchased from Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (St. Louis, MO, USA). Acetonitrile and ethanol of HPLC grade were obtained from Shanghai Lingfeng Chemical Reagent Co., Ltd. (Shanghai, China). Sep-Pak tC18 solid phase extraction (SPE) cartridge (78.4 μm of particle size) and sterile filters (0.22 μm) were purchased from Waters Corporation (Milford, MA, USA).
The [¹¹C]-TKF automated synthesis module (TRACERlab FX_c) was purchased from GE medical system. Semi-preparative high-performance liquid chromatography was conducted using a Waters pump (Waters Corporation) with a Bioscan radioactivity detector. Analytical radio-HPLC (Waters Corporation) was equipped with a dual λ absorbance detector (Waters 2487), binary HPLC pump (Waters 2487) and a Bioscan radioactivity detector. NMR and LC-MS were purchased from Bruker Corporation (Karlsruhe, Germany).

High-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection (Waters-2465, Waters Corporation, USA) was used for measuring plasma levels of NE as described previously34 (link). Briefly, samples or standards were derivatized with o-phtaldialdehyde; 20 μl of the resulting mixture was automatically loaded onto a Novapark C18 reverse-phase column (150 × 4.6 mm, 4 μm particle size, Waters), using a refrigerated autoinjector. The mobile phase consisted of NaH₂PO₄ (0.05 M, pH 6.8) with 20% methanol, and the flow rate was 1 ml/min delivered by a Waters pump. The NE concentration was detected and analyzed using Empower 3 analytical software (Waters).