On the quantitative determination of liver ferritin in the rat.

The measurement of liver ferritin is usually performed after homogenization of liver, heating the homogenate and centrifugation. Because ferritin is stable to 80 degrees this protein and its iron are recovered in the supernatant. We found that this procedure resulted in losses of ferritin so we developed a method to measure ferritin protein in the unheated homogenate. Total liver ferritin iron could be calculated with use of the ferritin protein and ferritin iron values as measured in the supernatant after heating the liver homogenate.