Cytochemistry and C-values: The Less-well-known World of Nuclear DNA Amounts

摘要

BackgroundIn the plant sciences there are two widely applied technologies for measuring nuclear DNA content: Feulgen absorbance cytophotometry and flow cytometry (FCM). While FCM is, with good reasons, increasingly popular among plant scientists, absorbance-cytophotometric techniques lose ground. This results in a narrowing of the methodological repertoire, which is neither desirable nor beneficial. Both approaches have their advantages, but static cytophotometry seems to pose more instrumental difficulties and material-based problems than FCM, so that Feulgen-based data in the literature are often less reliable than one would expect.