[Histonet] How to best treat mouse skin

[ndhomen]

Dear all,

I have recently started as a postdoc at the institute of cancer  
research in London and will be working with a mouse model. I will be  
wanting to fix and section mouse skin and have been exploring the  
best ways to do this in the histonet archives. Various options seem  
to work, so I'm finding it hard to discover what has been most  
successful for people. I'm thinking of shaving the skin and fixing it  
in 4% paraformaldehyde although I'm not sure what length of time is  
appropriate. I have noticed people both cryosection and paraffin  
embed the skin and would be interested to hear if anyone prefers one  
over the other or whether one method is better for certain procedures  
than others, and if anyone has any optimised embedding protocols. All  
advice would be greatly appreciated as I've not worked with skin before.
Oh and incidentally, if anyone knows how to extract DNA from fixed  
mouse skin that would be great, though I understand this forum is for  
histologists and I'm unlikely to get much comment on this point.

Sincerely,
Nathalie Dhomen