Hello all.  I have a couple of blocks embedded with mouse spleen tissue,
one which contains older mouse spleen (6 months old) and one with
younger mouse spleen (3 weeks).  These tissues are further sub-grouped
as coming from mice wildtype for caspase-2 or deleted for caspase-2.  

 

I wanted to assess the spleen morphology between the two strains b/c the
spleen from the deleted mouse appears to be larger as the mouse is older
(i.e. spleen from deleted versus wildtype at 3 weeks is same size).  The
morphology looked a little wonky, so I did a Prussian Blue stain.  I
have never done this stain before in mouse spleen and before I go
embedding some more tissue, I would like to get some info from people
who might already know the answer.  

 

The deleted and wildtype spleens from the 3-week-old mice looked similar
with respect to Prussian blue stain:  very few blue deposits in the
tissue.  In the older tissue, I saw a great deal of iron deposition in
the wildtype spleen but almost no deposition in the deleted spleen.
This is opposite to what I hypothesized.  I thought the deleted spleen
would be more damaged and have a greater amount of blue staining.  Now
I'm worried that the tissue might have been switched during collection
or processing - although the size of the tissue in the block and on the
section corresponds to the increased spleen size in the deleted mouse.
Does anybody out there know what an elderly mouse spleen should look
like after Prussian blue staining?

 

Thanks,

 

Jacqui Detmar, Post-doctoral Fellow

Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, room 876

Mount Sinai Hospital

600 University Avenue

Toronto, ON, Canada 

M5G 1X5

 

Tel:      416-586-4800 x2451

Fax:     416-586-8588

Email:  detmar@mshri.on.ca

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