Rapid Production of Graphite Without Contamination for Biomedical AMS

Abstract

The application of AMS to the detection of 14C makes possible a new class of sensitive experiments in molecular biology. Such experiments inherently produce large numbers of samples for the determination of biological variability in molecular interactions. The samples vary in 14C concentration over many orders of magnitude. We added TiH2 to aid the reduction of CO2 by zinc in a sealed tube to reproducibly make graphite without sample cross-contamination. The CO2 is transferred from a combustion tube to the reaction tube through a disposable plastic manifold. The sealed tubes are heated to a single-reaction temperature in a muffle furnace. The process is complete within 5 h. Bulk isotopic fractionation in the finished graphite is less than 0.5%.