A gamma counter for radionuclide detection in life & environmental science

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Radiochemistry has impacted almost all natural sciences, from biology and medicine to earth sciences.  Indeed, many of the great discoveries in biology, biochemistry, genetics and medicine over the past half century would not have been possible without radiochemical tracer techniques.  The use radiotracers has revolutionized nuclear medicine, allowing the in vivo characterization of molecular interactions (such as receptor binding) and enzymatic reactions.  Similar advances have occurred in plant and earth sciences, albeit at a slower pace.  Our group has extensive experience with the application of radiotracers to tackle a variety of biological and environmental research questions.  Among others, we investigate nutrition and metabolism of essential macronutrients and trace elements in plants and marine microorganisms, aiming to improve agriculture yields and to understand what controls primary productivity in the oceans.  We also use nuclides to constrain particle flux from the surface to the deep ocean and to investigate changes in ocean circulation during the past and present.  We have all of the necessary expertise and equipment to design and implement experiments using many different tracers.  Yet over the past year, our ability to analyze samples from these experiments has been seriously compromised by the repeated failure of our 30-year-old gamma counter.  This instrument is critical for the detection of radioactivity in our samples and without it, our research is greatly stalled.  This proposal seeks funds to purchase a replacement gamma counter for shared use by junior and senior investigators in the departments of Botany, Earth & Ocean Sciences, and Microbiology and Immunology at UBC.