Kathy- What do these cracks look like? Are they arranged in a parallel manner? Or do they have the appearance of the cracks seen in dry mud?
Parallel aligned cracks are often found in overprocessed small biospies. These small samples become hard and brittle. The impact of the tissue on the microtome blade during aggressive facing force these cracks deep into the tissue. With care, patience and some luck you may be able to get beyond these cracks by soaking the blocks, facing with thin sections on a repeated basis. What will determine whether you are successful will be whether there is enough depth to your biopsy to allow you to get beyond the facing artifact. If the cracks resemble dry earth, then we are looking at a fixation/processing issue. These cracks do not appear in the tissue until the xylenes after slide staining. If the tissues are not well fixed, then processing reagents will not be able to fully penetrate the tissues. If possible, I would suggest you perform retrims on your tissue and process them normally. They should have had enough time to fix when you do your retrims, and they should be fine. In a hospital setting, this may not be possible. You can deparaffinze and rehydrate your tissue samples by running them through your processor's cleaning program. Place them back in fixative for a while, then reprocess them. I have also seen this artifcat in tissue when (due to a processor malfunction) tissue samples were exposed to high heat during processing. Look for blood cells being "laked" in the larger blood vessels (blood cells look like a homogenous mass rather than being able to cell boundaries). Sometimes there will be small round black precitate granules over the affected tissue areas. You will need to determine the best course depending on the extent of the damage. Extensive damage will probaly require retrims. I hope this helps. Please get back with me if yoiu have any further questions. Joe Saby, BA HT 37 years in histotechnology ________________________________ From: Kathy Nelson <kathyenel...@hotmail.com> To: Histonet <histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu> Sent: Sun, December 19, 2010 1:25:54 AM Subject: [Histonet] Help Solutions for cracks in tissue microscopically esp. in tumors and BCC specimens. Thanks kathyenel...@hotmail.com _______________________________________________ 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