Carol,
My 2 cents worth...I have used the Promega kit with success. You can find
their technical literature at www.promega.com. They have kits for both
fluorometric and colorimetric methods. Their technical bulletins have the
procedure.

There are several companies that sell TUNEL kits of one flavor or another.
The original procedure was developed by Gavrielli et al. using
biotin-labled dUTP as the modified nucleotide.  I think the first
commercial kits were from Oncor using dig-dUTP; but, they no longer exist
as a company (recently bought out by Intergen). Boehringer Mannheim
(recently purchased by Roche), Trevigen, and others all sell kits. Just
check the price because they vary a lot.

The critical factor in the TUNEL procedure is probably the proteinase K
permeabilization step. I suggest that to be the first thing to be concerned
about optimizing.

Keep in mind that TUNEL may be prone to artifacts...so use morphology to
confirm TUNEL positive cells are really apoptotic. If you are working with
human tissue, there may also be some marker antibodies that will be useful
to detect apoptotic cells.

Ty Lee

----------
From: Carol J Tanck <ctanck@juno.com>
To: histonet@Pathology.swmed.edu
Subject: TUNEL stain
Date: Tuesday, January 05, 1999 6:34 PM

Histonetters:
	Can anyone provide me with the staining procedure for TUNEL?
Thanks.
Carol Tanck
University of Rochester
Rochester, N.Y.

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