Re: Cartilage staining

From:Jeffrey S Crews <cruzetti@juno.com>

Welcome to the wonderful world of tissue-engineering histology. I had the
pleasure for 8 years. Don't sweat it, you just have to reinvent
everything.
	You can try picking up the frozens on slides coated in gelatin or a
commercial tissue adhesive, then vapor-fixing the tissue to the slide
with aldehyde fumes. A few drops of formaldehyde or glutaraldehyde in a
sealed slide box should do it overnight. That always fixed my worst
adhesion problems. 
	For the polymer, try some other clearing agents besides xylene. Some of
the substitutes, either the aliphatic ones like Clearite or Histosolve or
the limonene ones might be more gentle on your polymer than xylene, which
is a pretty strong solvent for many plastics. 
	An aqueous mount might work after a thorough washing, but they never
look quite as good in my opinion. You might try a bake-on aqueous mount
like Clearmount (i think that's the name; it's been a while) to protect
the polymer, and then dip the slide in xylene and coverslip it after the
baking. That makes a good mount that I like better than straight aqueous
mounting, esp. for photography.
Good luck, and keep fiddling. You'll get it to work. 

Jeffrey Crews, HTL (ASCP)

On Mon, 13 Nov 2000 19:19:21 -0500 Tahir Mahmood <tahir@MIT.EDU> writes:
>Hi histonetters,
>
>I have a question about problems i am having with staining cartilage. 
>The
>biggest issue is that the tissue has been grown on synthetic polymers, 
>and

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