Preliminary assessment of a multiwire camera for quantitative autoradiography of tritium-labelled substances

We have assessed a multiwire camera for the high speed, quantitative autoradiography of tritium-labelled substances in two-dimensional systems. Exposure times for 3H were typically 1000 times less than film-based methods, with a detection efficiency of 19 +/- 3% for those beta particles predicted to escape into the sensitive region from uniformly 3H-labelled plastic segments of 30 micron thickness. The spatial resolving power was calculated to be 0.4 mm full width half maximum (FWHM), the background count rate was 1 CPM cm-2 and the lowest activity monitored for a biochemical study was 0.15 Bq cm-2. The camera is expected to have wide applications for detecting and quantifying biological substances in a wide range of separation media.