[Histonet] Detached vinyl coverslips - any advice on reattachment?

[taylor alan]

Hi Gordon

The issue you describe is a common one with tissue sections mounted with the old tape based cover slippers. We had one of these machines a few years ago, following years of hand mounting, it improved the throughput in the department quite successfully at the time. This machine was then replaced by a glass cover slipper. (which many of us wished we had bought in the first place) when we found several years down the line that when recovering archive slides for the pathologists to make comparisons with current diagnostic material it was found that many of these tape cover slipped sections had become detached from the glass slide, invariably the section was firmly attached to the convex underside of the plastic film. It was extremely difficult to re attach these sections to make them up to diagnostic quality. It meant in most cases that we had to pull the original blocks, do a re cut and present a freshly stained section, for comparison. Frustrating for all concerned, particularly the pathologist who had to wait for a replacement section.

The tape was merely attached to the slide with xylene, no mounting medium was needed, the slide went through a roller device to secure the tape strip and then a blade came across, at a pre set measurement to cut and finish the mounted section. As you are keeping your slides for personal interest, you could try and remount them with a soak in xylene followed by dispensing a thin line of DPX onto the slide, gently placing the tape over this and applying a light weight to gently press the cover slip down to flatten it and then place the remounted slide, with the weight still in place, in the slide drying oven overnight, or a warm place for a day or two. If you have about 400 sections to remount this is going to take some time. 

As we are both based in the UK if you contact me at my above e mail address I will be very happy to discuss other alternatives with you. Either way you are going to have a busy time with the task in front of you. 

Kind Regards

Alan Taylor BSc(Hons), FRMS.

Exeter. UK.

> 
>     On 15 November 2018 at 20:56 Gordon Brown via Histonet <histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu> wrote:
> 
>     I'm an amateur microscopist and along with a couple of fellow club members
>     we have acquired a fairly extensive collection of histopathology slides
>     (approx. 2500 slides) made in the early 2000s and used for seminar and
>     lecture purposes. We intend to use these to further our knowledge and
>     interest in histopathology and the majority of the slides are in superb
>     condition for this purpose and reasonably well documented. However,
>     approximately 300 to 400 of the slides are suffering from detachment of the
>     coverslip, these coverslips being made of what I assume to be vinyl, and we
>     are attempting to reattach them. Can anyone advise how this type of
>     coverslip was attached in the first instance? I'm assuming this was done
>     using an automatic coverslipper, but there's no easily visible trace of
>     mountant on either the slide or the coverslip so they may be self-adhesive
>     or use a heat activated adhesive. Each coverslip is 55.4mm x 24.1mm.
> 
>     Hope someone can help, if we know how they were attached in the first
>     instance this may give us some ideas for a strategy for reattachment.
> 
>     Regards
> 
>     Gordon
> 
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