Abstract
IT is very useful to be able to pin-point the activity of a tissue enzyme in a morphologically distinct sub-cellular unit, and this is frequently attempted by measuring the activity of the enzyme in fractions or sub-fractions obtained by centrifuging tissue homogenates. Succinic dehydrogenase is generally accepted and frequently used as an enzymatic marker for mitochondria in fractionation studies. It appears, however, that it is difficult to recover 100 per cent of the activity of succinic dehydrogenase of a homogenate after fractionation, particularly after centrifugation of particles in gradients of dense sucrose1–8, and the hopeful assumption has been made that the distribution of the recovered activity (ranging from 52 to 136 per cent) accurately reflects the true distribution (that is, that the errors or losses of activity are uniformly spread among the fractions). Experience has shown that this assumption can be far from the truth.
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JOHNSON, M. Treatment of Sub-cellular Particles prior to Assay of the Enzymatic Marker, Succinic Dehydrogenase. Nature 196, 1210–1211 (1962). https://doi.org/10.1038/1961210a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1961210a0
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