Combined Nuclear Transplantation and Isotope Techniques for the Study of Nuclear Activities

Abstract

Of the abundant techniques available to cell biologists, it is probable that almost all have been employed at one time or another to study some facet of the physiology of the cell nucleus. The rewards for these efforts—as can be seen by the other contributions to this number, as well as the reviews of Brachet (1957), Goldstein (1963), Mirsky and Osawa (1961), and Prescott (1960)—have been considerable. Although it is evident that the usefulness of many of the techniques for studies of nuclear function is far from exhausted, this writer would like to draw some attention to a few valuable techniques that are at hand but appear to be underemployed. These latter techniques are based primarily on nuclear transplantation and isotope methodology—both of which have been extensively used, of course, but not in combination. This combination is very potent in the attack on a variety of problems, yet there are few reports on work in which it has been employed; the few reports will be referred to later.

The work from our laboratory reported here has been supported by a research grant (RG-6774) from the United States Public Health Service.