Re:ear mounts

From:Barry Rittman <brittman@mail.db.uth.tmc.edu>

>  I am doing whole mounts of hamster ears and am having trouble getting
> them to lay flat on the slide.  Any suggestions?

This depends on what you have done with them and if you are going to mount
them in an aqueous mountant such as glycerin gelatine or after dehydration.
While most of our work has been done on epideral sheets from ears, I believe
the following comments still apply.

For both aqueous and dehdrated mounts, the ears can be kept somewhat flat if
the coverglasses are weighted down during hardening of the mountant, we use
small solid brass cylinders as weights.
If dehydrating etc. then we have found that the traditional clearing agents
such as xylene, toluene, oil of wintergren all tend to harden the ears and
cause them to curl up and to resist all efforts to flatten. We use terpineol
(oil of lilacin) after dehydration. This keeps the ears flexible and is also
very slow drying. Following soaking in terpineol,  excess terpineol is removed
using bibulous paper covered with filter paper or paper towels. The mountant
is then applied and the coverglass weighted down.
Terpineol is slow drying so the mountant will not harden as rapidly.
Hope that this helps
Barry




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