You wrote:
I have an adult bird skull that fixed with formalin and then has been stored in 70% ethanol. I have seen the post that the sample stored in 70% ethanol can be walking back through to series of ethanol to water and can be decalcified if it needs to be. I am wondering if anybody has done this and there is any side effects from decalcification after going through dehydration and rehydration of a sample compared to a general straight forward protocol from decalcification to dehydration? **************************************************************************** **************************************************************************** ******************************** I have, in the past, when a weekend arrive, I interrupted acid bone decalcification by removing it from acid decalcifier, a quick water rinse and immersed into 70% alcohol before returning bone to fresh acid decalcifier the next working day. The bones always decalcified without problems but I am sure the decalcification took longer since partially decalcified bone had to rehydrate. I later learned more about dipolar (hope I said that correctly) alcohol slowing and/or stopping ionization of calcium and ceased using 70% alcohol to interrupt acid decalcification. I now use NBF to interrupt decalcification. Interestingly, I learned the alcohol technique from the AFIP bone pathology lab. Alcohol is put into Perenyi's nitric acid decalcifying solutions to slow down or control very rapid nitric acid decalcification. You did not say how big the bird skull was? I suggest immersing the skull back into NBF to let it totally rehydrate for several days (depending on skull size and if the brain is present). I suggest changing NBF if you rehydrate longer than a day. You don't need to go back through an alcohol gradient since many processing schedules have tissue samples going from NBF directly into 70%. If you leave residual alcohol in the bones, the acid decalcification could be slower and hopefully not retarded in any way. It certainly is worth a try. Good luck. Gayle M. Callis HTL/HT/MT(ASCP) _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet