Abstract
Many biochemical reactions pass through exothermic stages which liberate energy. Such reactions as a rule involve molecules carrying excess energy, i.e., molecules in nonequilibrium excited states. The excitation energy is composed of the energy of the thermal effect and activation energy (Fig. 4.1). Deactivation of excited molecules occurs by various physical routes, and one of these is emission of the energy as light, viz. chemiluminescence.
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The term “dark” is very arbitrary. To some extent it is opposed to the term “induced” chemiluminescence. However, the term “very weak” chemiluminescence is no better. Moreover, we can hardly call this emission “spontaneous,” since it depends strongly on the external conditions (see Section 4.1).
A number of authors [Kaznacheev et al (1964); Kaznacheev (1965); Kaznacheev et al. (1965a-d)] also discovered visible emission in blood cells and some other objects, using the photoelectric method. However, the molecular mechanisms of this emission were not analyzed.
At present this term is often used to denote the chemiluminescence emission of biological objects in the UV, independently of the detector used.
The luciferin and luciferase of Cypridina are used as a convenient model for studying the action of irradiation and protective substances [Lohmann et al. (1963, 1964)). Moreover, it has been shown that luciferin exhibits anticarcinogenic activity [Shinazo (1964)].
This is not in accordance with earlier results [Gill (1963)], according to which the thermoluminescence peak of, e.g., tyrosine appears at 124°K, and the curves of phenylalanine have two peaks, at 113 and 155°K, which are due to the existence of two metastable levels (traps) of different energies. These discrepancies may be ascribed to different starting states of the materials used in the above studies and to the fact that different rates of heating may affect sharply the position of a given peak and its resolution on the corresponding curves [Lushchik (1955)].
The fact that thermally induced emission characteristics depend strongly on the type and energy of the ionizing radiation used in the irradiation stage follows from the work of Prydz and Rogeberg (1964), who determined the thermoluminescence spectra of tyrosine and tryptophan powders arising after irradiation. Such spectra are very different from the usual fluorescence and phosphorescence spectra of these amino acids (see Section 1.1), and also from thermoluminescence spectra appearing on γ irradiation. For tryptophan the spectral maxima were observed at 575 and 630 mμ, and for tyrosine at 490 mμ.
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© 1969 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Barenboim, G.M., Domanskii, A.N., Turoverov, K.K. (1969). Chemiluminescence of Cells and Organisms. In: Luminescence of Biopolymers and Cells. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6441-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6441-0_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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