Mary,

I am curious as to why you feel the need to use xylene for the trichrome? In a
previous job, we deparaffinized all special stains with xylene subs without any
problems.

Victor Tobias
Histology Supervisor

"Hess, Mary" wrote:

> Hello, this is in response to the recent xylene substitute questions. We
> currently use Pro-Par from Anatech for all deparaffining and clearing steps
> for every stain except Masson's Trichrome, where we use xylene instead. We
> just purchased an automatic slide stainer and are trying to put our three
> major stains on the machine at once, which means we need to combine the
> deparaffining and clearing steps. I like xylene for the quality of our
> trichrome, but man, its nasty stuff.  Is there a way to use pro-par (or any
> xylene substitute really)  for deparaffining and xylene for the last
> clearing stage? I will be running test slides trying to figure this out, but
> I'm hoping someone might have already have tried combining xylene and other
> xylene substitutes. My gut feeling is use one or the other but I might get
> lucky. By the way, thanks for the help with the H&E slide stainer
> information a couple of months back, we purchased the Mikrom Robot stainer.
> -Mary Hess, San Diego, Ca.