The time course of the concentration of radiocalcium was studied in the serum, skeleton, pelt, muscles, and pooled internal organs of 10-day-old rats. Within 10 hours of injection, the specific activity of the tissue groups exceeded the specific activity of the serum and remained above it during the period studied (120 hours).
Chemical and autoradiographic analyses showed how rapidly most of the injected Ca45 found its way into the skeleton. A model was constructed with the assumption that the skeleton constitutes an essentially irreversible reservoir for the tracer in a multicompartment system in which the blood is the central or feeding compartment.
The rate of transfer of the tracer from the soft tissue compartments to the serum was calculated from the equation
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in which C = concentration in serum (expressed as a series of exponential terms)
C' = concentration in a given soft tissue
Substitution in the integrated form of this equation yielded equations which had the major properties of the empirical equations fitted to the experimental points. The relative order of transfer constants (k'–1) was: organs ≥ pelt > muscle.
