[Histonet] Question concerning TTC staining

[Lapointe, Nathalie,Ph.D.]

Hi,

I'm a fellow student at the Brigham and Women's hospital (Boston, MA), and I
need an information in order to complete a paper.

TTC staining was used to measure infarct size in rats dying between 4 and 24
hours - does such staining can only be performed accurately when the heart is
excised and stained immediately after death?  If the hearts were allowed to sit
for some variable time period in dead animals, does the measurements would not
have been accurate and the data would be unreliable? Since infarct size was used
as a criterion for grouping most of the other data sets, an inaccuracy
introduced into this measurement may have affected nearly all other statistical
comparisons presented in the paper. However from my experience,  an 6-8-hour
delay of TTC staining is reliable for evaluating heart infarct size in a rat.
Does this probably is attributable to the slow deterioration of mitochondrial
enzyme activity in nonischemic heart over this time period? 
The only paper that I found concerning that matter is not with the heart but
with the brain (in rat): " Delayed triphenyltetrazolium chloride staining
remains useful for evaluating cerebral infarct volume in a rat stroke model. Li
F, Irie K, Answer MS, Fisher M. Department of Neurology, Memorial Health Care,
Worcester, Massachusetts 01605, U.S.A." 
Does anybody have further references or info for me?
Thank you very much,
Dr Nathalie Lapointe