A gamma counter for radionuclide detection in life & environmental science

放射化学几乎影响了从生物学、医学到地球科学的所有自然科学。事实上，在过去的半个世纪里，如果没有放射化学示踪技术，生物学、生物化学、遗传学和医学上的许多伟大发现都是不可能的。放射性示踪剂的使用使核医学发生了革命性的变化，使分子相互作用(如受体结合)和酶反应的活体表征成为可能。在植物和地球科学中也出现了类似的进展，尽管速度较慢。我们团队在应用放射性示踪剂解决各种生物和环境研究问题方面拥有丰富的经验。我们研究植物和海洋微生物中必需的常量营养素和微量元素的营养和新陈代谢，旨在提高农业产量，并了解是什么控制了海洋的初级生产力。我们还使用核素来限制从表面到深海的颗粒通量，并调查过去和现在的海洋循环变化。*我们拥有所有必要的专业知识和设备，可以设计和实施使用许多不同示踪剂的实验。但在过去的一年里，我们已有30年历史的伽马计数器的反复故障严重损害了我们分析这些实验样本的能力。虽然这台仪器对于检测我们样本中的放射性至关重要，但如果没有它，我们的研究就会严重停滞不前。该提案寻求资金购买替代伽马计数器，供UBC植物学、地球和海洋科学系以及微生物学和免疫学系的初级和高级研究人员共享使用。

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.