Talk:Autofluorescence

Comment

Uhm... what? Can someone please explain what this is in plain English for those of us without a PhD in Science? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.227.87.61 (talk) 20:47, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I've attempted to simplify some of the jargon! Jebus989^✰ 18:55, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Addition by 98.253.29.254

The following block of text was added to the foot of the article by 98.253.29.254 (talk · contribs). I'm moving it here because it was 1) misplaced ii)not sourced iii)is confusingly worded and iv) doesn't fit into the article in its present state. I also had copyvio concerns (because of a large one-edit addition from an IP) but I haven't found any evidence of this.^yet

===DEVELOPERS NOTES (Based on American Chemical Society Publication Oct. 2008):=== '''Non-biological autofluorescence''' of industrial [[Chemical Materials]] has been described. In one such application from U.S. and International patent literature, disordered materials have been discovered and analyzed as a result of the specialized analysis of resinous-based macromolecules. As two types of such disordered materials are possible, exogenous autofluorescence occurs in those disordered materials where a nano-containing substance is intentionally placed in the microstructure to elucidate fluorescence. For endogenous autofluorescence of intrinsically disordered polymers, the autofluorescence signal is derived from the intrinsic microstructure of the molecule. The fluorescence signal is expected to be stronger in aromatics than aliphatics with pi-bonding contributing to useful signal intensity. With the specific polymers that have been investigated, the fluorescence signal occurs where peaks are observed, reduced, diminished, eliminated, (''intentionally missing'') or shifted in intensity from comparison samples with possible baseline changes. Typically, fluorescence is a UV/Vis feature in the photonics world. As with biological autofluorescence, distortions in the skeletal structure of reprocessed, aromatic resins have resulted in more signal intensity than the backbone chain. The resulting intensities from these contributing functional groups, corresponds to 'extracellular' and 'cellular' fluorescence of biologicals. The term autofluorescence is also a trademark which can be written in many forms.

I will try to locate the article referenced in the header, and see if useful information can be incorporated form this block Jebus989^✰ 21:53, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

File:PaperAutofluorescence.jpg to appear as POTD soon

Hello! This is a note to let the editors of this article know that File:PaperAutofluorescence.jpg will be appearing as picture of the day on January 31, 2012. You can view and edit the POTD blurb at Template:POTD/2012-01-31. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page so Wikipedia doesn't look bad. :) Thanks! —howcheng {chat} 20:43, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Picture of the day

A light microscope image of tissue paper. The tissue was illuminated with ultraviolet light making it glow blue due to natural autofluorescence, the same effect which makes paper glow with a black light. The tangled network of fibres are cellulose fibres which are derived from wood and make up all types of paper and cardboard. It is a combination of the properties of cellulose and additional optical brightening agents which makes the tissue glow.Photo: Richard Wheeler

Merger Proposal since January 2012

I seem to the the first person ever to comment on this proposal; my feeling is Keep, on the grounds that the phenomenon goes well beyond the life sciences. Also, given that this a stale proposal, I'll delist it. Klbrain (talk) 20:53, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Contradictions

The lead has contradicting information. I don't really know enough about the topic to feel confident fixing it, just wanted to point it out.

• "Autofluorescence is the natural emission of light by biological structures such as mitochondria and lysosomes when they have absorbed light.."
• "Autofluorescence also occurs in non-biological materials found in many papers and textiles."

So is it in biological structures only? ^†Basilosauridae❯❯❯Talk 20:47, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Autofluorescence is typically seen in biological organisms and structures that being said many synthetic materials such as certain plastics can also fluoresce under UV light the same as many biological structures. Autofluorescence then I would say is a property of many materials, but is most commonly found in biological materials. If you'd like I can attempt to find sources for synthetic materials that auto fluoresce. RameMun37 (talk) 19:20, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Converted summary table at end – it needs checking

I converted the summary table to have columns with marks in them, to replace the written name of the "organism" (former column heading). Many of the rows were listed as "All". My problem with that is that neither fungi nor bacteria were ever listed as a separate category (although the fungi were taxonomically included via "Eucariotes").

Bacteria / Archea seem such a vast category that I would expect to find an example of any biological characteristic in some of them (excepting, of course, cell nuclei). E.g., I expect that fluorescence seen in animals' mitochondria will be duplicated in at least some Rickettsidae bacteria, and that some of the autofluorescence shown by plants has to come from their chloroplasts, so very similar autofluorescence probably would be found in cyanobacteria (they're packed full of similar photo-active molecules, after all).

Rather than tearing down the changes I made, I took a clue from the single "eukariotes" line and interpreted "All" as "all eukariotes". I'm leaving it as-is (with "All" = "Animals + Fungi + Plants", and not fretting about more obscure kinds of Eukariotes). It needs someone competent to check it. And in any case, I believe that some of the "All" lines might be wrong, based on the lines I did check:

I looked up Zipfel, Williams, et al. (2003). It's the most broadly cited article for the lines marked "All"; briefly searching through that article I found no mention of kingdom-level taxonomic categories of organisms, just names of biomolecules. So the in-place citations aren't obviously helpful for checking the legitimacy of the categories. At least, not without some other reference.

However, checking up on the Wikipedia riboflavin (vitamin B) article reveals that it is not produced in animal tissues. That seems suspicious to me: possibly the "All" mark might have been a mistake. However I can also imagine that since animals need it, even if they don't produce it, so maybe animals keep enough stored riboflavin in their tissues to autofluoresce without having made it on their own, just accumulating it from their food.

Could a competent biologist please review the table, please?

Regards
166.205.91.35 (talk) 04:53, 11 March 2022 (UTC)