[Histonet] HISTO STAINS

[John Baker]

>
> Subject: HISTO STAINS
>
>
> Dear Histonet,
>
> Question about staining.
>
> We are trying to stain paraffin embedded sections of a rat mandible in 
> order to
> use Bioquant software to threshold mineralized bone vs. non-bone.  In 
> the past,
> we used plastic sections, and we stained them with the "Modified
> Villanueva-Gomori Trichrome" for plastic.  We mistakenly used this same
> procedure for our paraffin sections, and we achieved the color 
> differentiation
> we wanted as far as blue vs. red.  However, the colors were not very 
> intense,
> and we are having trouble thresholding where at the interface of bone 
> and
> non-bone.
>
> Is there any stain we can use that will keep the same colors, but more 
> intense?
> We cannot use a stain such as the "Gomori One-Step Trichrome" for 
> paraffin
> because we cannot have any red scattered throughout the regions of 
> mineralized
> bone (the software cannot differentiate between red that is bone and 
> red that
> is non-bone.
>
> Thanks,
> Krikor Arman
>
>
>
John A. Baker
Histology Unit
Orthopaedic Research Laboratories
The University of Michigan
400 North Ingalls, G-161
Ann Arbor, MI 48103-0486
office phone:734-936-1635