Analysis of data on efflux of radioactive ions from isolated membrane vesicles

Conventional semilogarithmic plots of radioisotope-retained [y(t)], by membrane vesicles during efflux, against time give a gross overestimate of the half-life (t 1/2) of the efflux, if a significant proportion of the radioisotope is retained at equilibrium. By using simulated efflux experiments, it is shown that apparent linearity of such plots evidenced by excellent linear correlation coefficients may not detect such error. 45Ca efflux from …