Abstract: The method of detecting the contents of biogenic amine in alcoholic beverages (rice wine) by HPLC was developed. The optimized condition was: samples were extracted by 0.4mol/L HClO4, and then derived using Dns-Cl. The mobile phase was ··a gradient elution program with a binary mixture of acetonitrile and water. The flow rate was 0.8ml/min. Diode array detector was used in the final determination with λ=254nm. The detection limits were 0.05μg/ml for cadaverine, histamine and spermidine, 0.1μg/ml for tyramine, and 0.25μg/ml for spermine. It is linear over the range of concentrations between 2.0 and 40μg/ml (R >0.99).The recovery of the method were 96.6%,101.94%,101.90%,98.65%,107.4% for cadaverine, histamine, tyramine, spermidine and spermine, respectively. By this method the kinds and contents of biogenic amine in rice wine was firstly determined. It was noticed that the biogenic amine kinds and contents varied with different rice wine. The average of total biogenic amine in rice wine was 114.45μg/ml . The variation was 39.27 ～241.07μg/ml。

Key words: HPLC, biogenic amine, rice wine