A New Technique for Counting Aqueous Solutions in the Liquid Scintillation Spectrometer

Abstract

An efficient aqueous system for liquid scintillation counting has yet to be found. At present all of the effective fluors are highly nonpolar and can be used only in an organic solvent system, toluene and dioxane being commonly used examples. If the materials to be assayed are themselves nonpolar, as in the case of lipids, there are no compatibility problems. However, a great many, if not most, of the compounds of biochemical interest are polar, water-soluble materials with very limited solubility in solvents like toluene and dioxane. To take advantage of the simplicity and efficiency of liquid scintillation counting in studies involving such compounds, it becomes necessary to arrange a marriage of convenience between the polar biological material and the nonpolar fluor. This marriage has been effected in a variety of ways for a variety of specific applications. Some of these are briefly reviewed below. Still, no entirely satisfactory general “solution” has been found and the biochemist frequently has to improvise in order to solve each individual scintillation counting problem. The present paper describes a new approach to the assay of water-soluble samples [1, 2,13].

Presented at the Second Symposium on Advances in Tracer Applications of Tritium, 1958.