Talk:Photobleaching
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, which collaborates on articles related to physics. | |
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale. [FAQ] | |
| ??? | This article has not yet received an importance rating within physics. | |
|
Please rate this article, and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. |
||
 |
This article is within the scope of the Molecular and Cellular Biology WikiProject. To participate, visit the WikiProject for more information. The current monthly improvement drive is Signal transduction. | ||
|
Article Grading: The article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.. |
|||
The tag at the bottom of this page (the stub indicator) is cell biology but this is more of a physics / chemistry topic. I am not sure if its important, but it may be more likely that someone with the necessary skills and background will find the page if it is differently labelled.
Also (and again I'm not sure about this) I'm not certain that photobleaching means the same thing in FRAP as it does in standard fluorescence experiments. I also think the idea of lifetimes is a little confused - fluorescence lifetimes are the length of time between absorption of excitation energy and emission of the photon by the flourophore. The changes which occur to the flourophore during this time give important information. Of course their may be more than one use of the term lifetime - this could be one of those situations where cell biologists and biophysicists use the same name to describe different phenomena.
FRAP stands for fluoresence recovery after photobleaching, as far as I can tell this method is based around the formation of a chemically long lived, but nonetheless temporary formation of a triple excited state which does not fluoresce. Photobleaching in standard flourescence experiments is permanent and the result of covalent modification to the protein following free radical formation due to prolonged exposure to UV light. From the strategene website http://www.stratagene.com/lit/faq/faq.aspx?fqid=323...
Photobleaching or fading is the loss of fluorescence with exposure to light. It occurs when a fluorophore permanently loses the ability to fluoresce due to photon-induced chemical damage and covalent modification. Minimizing the exposure of dye-containing samples to light will help reduce photobleaching, as will shorter exposures to the high intensity light used for fluorescence microscopy.
I am not sufficently knowledgable to want to edit this page, but I think that it will need to be divided into two sections, the first considering photobleaching w.r.t. FRAP and the second w.r.t. fading and loss due to formation of covalent modification etc.
--J
