[MOS] March 13, 2007

[Zina Queen]

Seminar on
Modern Optics and Spectroscopy


Daniel Murnick,
Rutgers University

Counting carbon 14 atoms for health improvement

March 13, 2007

12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Grier Room 34-401


Carbon 14 (radiocarbon) is an ideal organic tracer having an 
extremely low natural abundance in living systems, near 1 ppt, and a 
long lifetime, 5730 years, ideal for clinical and laboratory tracer 
experiments.  Until recently all quantitation of 14C content has been 
by scintillation detection of the low energy beta particle emitted in 
its decay.  Beta detection provides good specificity to 14C but 
relatively low sensitivity as there is only one decay per minute for 
each 3.5 billion 14C atoms present. At present there is great 
interest in the drug development community for pharmacokinetic 
information on new drug entities using non therapeutic microdoses of 
labeled drugs, which require much higher analysis sensitivity than is 
possible with scintillation counting .  This talk describes a laser 
based technique for counting 14C atoms.  The technique involves the 
development and application of  intra-cavity optogalvanic 
spectroscopy.
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