Although I don't use radioactivity often, there are still a few
procedures where I do or would choose to use it.
For blotting/hybridization procedures, I would still choose
radioactivity, hands down. As far as I know, most non-radioactive
detection procedures require an immunoblot-like detection step. In my
opinion, this just adds one more additional set of steps that needs
to be optimized and opportunity for noise or background to be
introduced inot the experiment. When might one want to do some type
of hybridization experiment? A conventional library screen (I've done
one of these in the last 2 years), outhern bolt to determination of
the number of loci for a transgenic event, or looking at whether
there are multiple classes of transcripts corresponding to a given
gene. For the latter, if one wants quantitative data, radioactivity
is linear over several orders of magnitude while most non-radioactive
detection systems have a far more limited linear range.
Of course there are many biochemistry experiments that are most
easily done with radioactivity, but this will be largely dependent on
exactly what you are working on. I may be facing doing kinetics on a
methyl transferase soon. From my perusal of the literature, this
looks like it will be much simpler to do with radioactivity than by
any other approach.
Mike
On Dec 10, 2009, at 5:43 PM, Hachey, John wrote:
If you were to start up a molecular biology lab today, would you
require
a setup for radioactive work? With all the various chromogenic,
chemiluminescent and fluorogenic
detection reagents available today, is radioactivity extraneous?
Any specific protocols
still absolutely requiring radioactivity?
Thanks, Curious John
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