Working with radioactive isotopes requires diligent attention to safety measures, in order to avoid hazardous exposure(s). Because radioactivity cannot be detected without instrumentation, spills can easily be spread through and even out of the lab before they are noticed. Safety in radioisotope work requires sufficient attention to both containment and surveillance. Containment measures are designed…

Samples of animal or plant tissue are rarely thin or small enough to allow for full counting efficiency. Homogenization of such samples will allow them to be dispersed into a cocktail, but processing large numbers of radioactive samples by homogenization is not practical. To allow for efficient and consistent counting of tissue samples, tissue solubilizers…

A common radiotracer technique is to precipitate macromolecules (protein & DNA) with TCA or some other strong denaturant, collect the precipitate on a filter and count it. Often such procedures give variable results, depending upon the degree to which the sample disperses from the filter into the cocktail. A typical artifact is counts which rise…

In a typical TLC experiment, the radioactivity is detected at two points: after TLC it is analyzed by autoradiography, to locate radioactive spots. These spots are then scraped off of the plate and counted to provide quantitative information. Each of these steps can be enhanced using the following protocols. Autoradiography and LSC with TLC Plates…

An aspect of LSC which must be considered in experimental design, is waste disposal. Unlike solid scintillation, LSC adds components to the sample increasing the volume of radioactive material by up to 1000 fold. The components of the LSC cocktail may represent a hazard or a disposal problem in addition to the radioactivity. For many…