>>Do you have any leads on differentiating and staining muscle fiber types? We have mixed fiber type whole muscle embedded in paraffin and want to tell if there is a difference between rats in the % distribution of muscle types. They are sometimes called fast twitch and slow twitch muscles.<<

You can't do any of the enzymatic fiber-type stains (such as myosin
ATPase) on paraffin embedded tissues. I think that there are some
immunohistochemical techniques that can be used for this purpose.

PAS (without amylase) in my experience will sometimes stain fiber
types in human muscle, but it doesn't work consistently.

Human and rat fiber types do not exactly correspond to each other, and
of course there's always the species specificity question with IHC
techniques.

Bob Richmond
Samurai Pathologist
Knoxville TN

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