Re: Benedicks' Solution

From:Ford Royer

Well, Russ, your question has finally drawn me out into this thread and
forced me to show my age (as some one else mentioned).

As a young lab rat pup, we did all of our FBS (Fasting Blood Sugars) and
GTT (Glucose Tolerance Tests) with the Benedict's reagent method.  You
had to hand pipette the Benedicts reagent into how ever many standard
test tube cuvettes that were required (some time over two dozen or so),
add the patient's serum and standards, place all of this in a boiling
water bath under the fume hood and "cook" for 10 minutes.  Then, after
carefully wiping off each cuvette in turn, read the standards and
patient's samples on a Coleman Jr. II spectrophotometer.  A standard
curve was drawn by hand with the data from the standards and each
patient result was read "X-Y" axis off of this chart.  Did it every day
for a number of years.

The Folin-Wu method used the same Benedicts principle - reduction of
cuprous ions - but it used whole blood rather than serum or plasma as
the specimen of choice.  This added an extra adventure to the labor
intensive process, as you had to remove all of the protein (albumin,
globulin, and hemoglobin) from the sample before you could react the
supernatant. This was done by precipitating out the protein and
capturing it in a specially designed "Folin-Wu tube".  The worst part of
the Folin-Wu method was trying to clean these special tubes after the
procedure was over.  Have you ever tried to remove cooked egg white from
the inside of a "V" shaped turkey baster?

AHHHH the memories.

~ Ford
-------
Ford Royer, MT(ASCP)
Analytical Instruments, Inc.
Minneapolis, MN
(800) 565-1895, Ext. 17

RUSS ALLISON wrote:

> Wasn't the Folin and Wu tube involved with that procedure?
> [prematurely aged] Russ
>
> Russ Allison,
> Dental School
> Cardiff
> Wales





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