It was found that native amino acids enhanced the chemiluminescence (CL) reaction between luminol and BrO- in an alkaline aqueous solution. This has led to the development of a facile and highly sensitive CL detection scheme for the determination of amino acids in biological samples after capillary electrophoretic (CE) separation. The CE-CL conditions were optimized. An electrophoretic buffer of 2.5 x 10(-2) M sodium borate (pH 9.4) containing 1 x 10(-4) M luminol was used. The oxidizer solution of 8 x 10(-4) m NaBrO in 0.1 M sodium carbonate buffer solution (pH 12.5) was introduced post-column. Under the optimal conditions, the detection limits were 1.0 x 10(-7) M for glutamic acid (Glu) and 1.3 x 10(-7) M (S/N = 3) for aspartic acid (Asp). The relative standard deviations (RSDs) of peak area and migration time were in the ranges of 3.8-4.3% and 1.4-1.6%, respectively. The present method was applied to the determination of excitatory amino acids (i.e., Asp and Glu) in rat brain tissue and monkey plasma. The levels of these major excitatory amino acids in monkey plasma were quantified for the first time and found to be 1.17 ± 0.17 x 10(-5) M (mean ± SD, n = 6) for Glu and 1.64 ± 0.19 x 10(-6) m for Asp, which were comparable with the levels in human plasma.