[Histonet] Freezing Biopsies

[Kathleen Spencer]

Amos,
The way we did this was to place the biopsy in a plastic mold, add OCT, 
grab the huge forceps and plunge it into liquid nitrogen and count to 5 
or 10, I can't remember, but it always worked fine. We did not use 
isopentane. The surface of the block was always nice and smooth. It had 
to be! The biopsies were so tiny. What you can do is get a fresh mold, 
put a little OCT in the bottom, put the frozen block in and spray it a 
little with cryo spray. You should now have a smooth surface for 
sectioning.

Good Luck!

Kathleen Spencer HT (ASCP)
Lab Manager/LCM Supervisor
UTHSC


On Jan 25, 2005, at 8:07 PM, Amos Brooks wrote:

> Hi,
> 	I'm snap freezing kidney biopsies in OCT using isopentane that is 
> chilled with liquid nitrogen. I'm having a problem where the area that 
> the biopsy is gets raised up above the surface of the block. I'm not 
> sure what is going wrong and more importantly what to do about it. Has 
> anyone had similar problems and how did you solve it?
>
> Thanks,
> Amos Brooks
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Histonet mailing list
> Histonet <@t> lists.utsouthwestern.edu
> http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet