The correct answer is "b": if there is water underneath the section that is going to be placed on the hot plate, the most likely artifact is that of "empty nuclei" that will ruin the sections' usefulness. René J.
--- On Fri, 8/13/10, Gibson, Philip <philip.gib...@nuth.nhs.uk> wrote: From: Gibson, Philip <philip.gib...@nuth.nhs.uk> Subject: [Histonet] Acceptable way to "bake" sections onto slides? To: histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu Date: Friday, August 13, 2010, 8:23 AM Hi In our "fairly large" histopathology lab we're hoping to consolidate our autostainers and coverslippers to only two (Sakura) machines. In order to efficiently do this, we would need to bypass the autostainer's oven so that multiple racks of slides can be processed continuously without any 10-15 minute hold-ups. Therefore, we would like our four separate microtomist teams to place freshly-cut sections on a hotplate to "bake" for 10 minutes, before being picked up into racks and transferred directly to xylene on the autostainer. My question: Do hotplates work well enough to do this? Two conflicting views in my lab are (a) Yes, this would work in my experience, and (b) No, this creates artifacts because water trapped underneath the sections boils and does damage. Of course, the more conventional approach would be to use ovens, but loading and unloading an oven before the autostainer is an additional wasteful step. What do my fellow histonetters think? Many Thanks Phil ---------------------------------------- Phil Gibson Senior Biomedical Scientist Histopathology Dept Royal Victoria Infirmary Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 4LP Ext. 24565 Tel. 0191 2824565 This email has been processed by SmoothZap - www.smoothwall.net _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet
