Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
Like ethidium, proflavine is a nucleic-acid binding dye that intercalates, or inserts itself between base pairs.
Proflavine found some use as an antiseptic at one point (as far as I know, that day has passed). It is one of the earliest known intercalators. Unlike ethidium, its fluorescence actually goes down upon binding to DNA; this is the more common case for fluorescent DNA-binding drugs. See the spectrum of proflavine cation here.
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Hi, love the site! I have a question I hope you can help me with. We are looking to find a cleaner/more specific DNA-specific chromogenic stain than those commonly in use for tissue staininig. The most popular chromogenic DNA stain in current use seems to be hematoxylin but for our purposes it gives too much background (non-nuclear) stain. In thinking about this we realized that what we'd like to have is something like one of the fluorescent DNA binding dyes in use, such as DAPI which gives excellent signal to noise. Do you know of any dyes that have the type of specificity that DAPI has but would be visible under normal (not fluorescence) light microscopy?
Thanks!
-AM
Posted by: Alan Meeker | August 1, 2007 11:48 AM