Requirement of an Internal Standard for Microspectrophotometric Measurements of Dna

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Cytophotometric measurements of DNA quantity per cell from 45 different Pinus rigida trees obtained from 135 slides showed that an internal standard was necessary in order to avoid serious errors. Chicken red blood cells were incorporated on the same slide as the pine cells, permitting the calculation of the actual mass units of DNA per pine nucleus. The use of these units makes the results of different investigations and investigators directly comparable. Staining variation between slides and staining batches was shown to be the reason for the requirement of an internal standard. DNA quantity in Feulgen units varied as much as 2.9 fold between different slides of red blood cells although the actual quantity of DNA is constant at 2.8 picograms per nucleus.