[Histonet] mouse skeletal muscle frozen section prep

[Spinette, Sarah]

I am new to working with mouse skeletal muscle and have been reading about various methods for preparing and freezing tissue for sectioning.

I have heard of the benefits of coating the tissue in talc prior to freezing but have not yet seen a single protocol that describes the use of talc and OCT or other medium IN plastic molds, can you still use talc and then plunge the tissue into cold OCT in the mold end then plunge the entire block into LiN2 (we do not have isopentane)?

Also, can anyone comment about when and how they choose to fix the tissue first and if they use paraformaldehyde before freezing?

Thank you!