calvin's cycle

[biomed7]

can anyone please tell me how the autoradiography is linked to calvin's cycle? and how can it used to work out the sequence of a metabolic pathways.

i know that in autoradiography is used an x- ray film to locallise the radioisotopic compounds.

on the other hand melvin calvin won the nobel prize for using radioactive carbon-14 to show that plants turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar during photosyntheseis

book recomendations would be very much appreciated..........thanks

[canalon]

14C is not used only with autoradiography. I am not sure about this, but I guess that he probably put 14CO2 in the atmospher the plant were breathing in for more or less time and then detected which compound were becoming radioactive as the time after exposure was increasing.

[MrMistery]

Yeap, that's right. Calvin and Bensen discovered what is now called the Calvin cycle by using radioactive Carbon. Then, using a machine that picked up the radiation they detected the componds that the carbon was entering.