[Histonet] oops - samples directly to paraffin

[Tamara A Howard]

Help! I need the collective wisdom of the HistoNet this 
morning. Some students (who should know better) loaded 
their samples on to the processor yesterday afternoon but 
didn't have it set up correctly; the basket went directly 
in to one of the paraffin beakers and they didn't notice 
the error. Their PI went a few hours later to check up on 
the run and caught it; she put the cassettes directly in a 
beaker of buffer. Now we are wondering about the best way 
to rescue the samples: Take them to xylene-substitute to 
deparaffinize *OR* warm them up to melt the paraffin and 
fish out the pieces? Or some other brilliant solution? The 
tissue pieces are too small to chip out of the solid 
paraffin without risking a lot of damage. These were mouse 
bits destined for IHC - are they totally screwed?

Advice, experience, horror stories all welcome.

Thanks!

Tamara

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Tamara Howard
Cell Biology & Physiology
UNM-HSC
Albuquerque, NM
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