[Histonet] Coverslipping mystery

[John Kiernan]

DPX is a polystyrene mounting medium. In principle you can make your own from published recipes. In practice, everyone buys commercial resinous mounting media.

In the 1990s we had trouble similar to what you describe. The commercial DPX was cloudy, and not because of alcohol in our xylene. The Canadian supplier acknowledged the bad DPX and urged us to buy Entellan instead. Entellan is a poly(methacrylate) plastic and is an excellent but expensive mounting medium. Another poly(methacrylate) mountant called CytoSeal was less expensive and also came in a squeeze-easy plastic bottle for delivery onto the slide or coverslip. It's now my routine resious mountant. 

Good DPX returned to the market in the 2000s, but in old-fashioned bottles and not easy to apply to slides or coverslips. 

John Kiernan
= = =
On 09/07/15, Adam Boanas  <a.boanas at epistem.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> We are having a problem that is developing into a big issue in our lab and I was wondering if anybody could shed any light on it. Our CV5000 coverslipper has recently started introducing microscopic air bubbles onto the slides during coverslipping. We have been told by our engineer that it is a consequence of the age and use of the motor and that sourcing another for an instrument that old (15yrs) will be v difficult. As such, we have been forced to manually coverslip using DPX and a pipette - manually applying the coverslips to the slide, thus mirroring the action of the coverslipper. This is fine at first and for the next few days the slides look great and very clean. However, after about day 4 -5 days post coverslipping, the slides develop an odd appearance down the microscope which looks like very fine `parched earth / crazy paving` all over the slide - including the section. The excess mountant around the edge of the coverslip also has a very faint, cloudy appearance wh!
>  en this occurs. This of course renders the slide un-useable. Does anyone have a clue what this might be down to / how we can stop it?
> We are struggling for ideas with this one! - this occurs with fresh DPX also.
> 
> Many thanks
> Adam
> 
> Adam Boanas
> Senior Research Associate
> Epistem Ltd
> 48 Grafton Street
> Manchester, M13 9XX
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Histonet mailing list
> Histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu
> http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet
> 
>