Silicon Drift Photodiodes for Tritium Detection

Radioactive labeling of proteins using tritium is a very important technique used in neurological ridentify, isolate, and investigate the expression of proteins in biological systems. It is often necradiolabel for this work because tritium in vivo labeled proteins retain their conformal structure aassays. Currently, many tritium-labeled binding assays are done using inconvenient, time consuming,techniques involving scintillation cocktail measurement because no reliable and sensitive tritium dequantify the radioactivity directly and non-destructively from the sample. We will develop a novel ssystem capable of measuring the spatial activity distribution of tritiated biological specimens withintensive liquid scintillation fluid techniques. This system is based on a large area array of silicwill be capable of directly sensing the low energy radiation emissions of the tritium-labeled samplepaper. A system based on the parallel acquisition of many such pixel elements would provide superiorfor a wide variety of tritium-binding assays and thus will represent a significant productivity incrwhile greatly reducing the quantity of chemical and radioactive waste that is generated.