An essential to the study of the histiogenesis of leprosy consists of reliable demonstrations of the bacilli in tissues. In the older days, when celloidin embedding was more widely used, fair results were often seen. Paraffin embedding, however, has almost totally replaced celloidin in common practice, and the problem has become that of determining the conditions of fixation, dehydrating, and s...

Laser microdissection (LMD) is now becoming a powerful tool to elucidate the spatial profiling of gene expression. However, a remaining difficulty is obtaining high integrity RNA from fixed and embedded tissues in order to obtain accurate and reliable expression analyses. This study aimed to develop methods for the preparation of high integrity RNA from aleurone cells and starchy endosperm of d...

Seasonal variability in kidney morphology of the house sparrow Passer domesticus was examined using light microscopy. Sparrows were captured from the wild in winter, spring, summer and autumn. The kidneys were perfused with half-strength Karnovsky's fixative and processed for light microscopy by embedding in either paraffin wax or JB4 acrylic resin. Absolute volumes of the kidneys, their compon...

Attempts to encourage widespread use of plastic embedding to improve morphological detail in human bone marrow biopsy specimens have failed because the procedures were too time-consuming and laborious to replace the simpler and more expeditious procedures for paraffin embedding. We have systematically investigated a variety of fixation and embedding procedures and arrived at a method that allow...

Large repositories of well characterized RNAlater preserved samples and formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded samples have been generated worldwide. However, the impact on the proteome of the preservation methods remain poorly described. Therefore, we analyzed the impact on the proteome of preserving samples in RNAlater, and by formalin-fixation, paraffin-embedding on human soft tissue, using direc...

Podocyte loss and glomerular hypertrophy are associated with development of glomerulosclerosis, suggesting that there may be a maximal area for each podocyte in terms of its capacity to support and maintain the glomerular filter. This study hypothesized that exceeding this maximal threshold will result in mesangial expansion and glomerulosclerosis. It may therefore be useful to measure podocyte...

The unclear role of cytokeratin (CK) in the progression and diagnostics of malignant melanomas stimulated us to compare the reactivity of three antibodies directed to CK in 109 paraffin-embedded melanomas. By far the majority of melanomas did not express cytokeratin even at the<1% level, only vimentin. In about 6% of melanomas it was possible to find CK expression ranging between 3 and 40% of m...

The antigen retrieval (AR) technique, which is predominantly based on high-temperature heating of tissues, is used as a non-enzymatic pretreatment for immunohistochemical staining of formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue sections. It has been widely applied in pathology and analytical morphology. The existence of a growing body of literature on the AR technique raises a number of interesting...