Histological Fixation with Formalin under Microwave Irradiation
Abstract
The use of microwaves can be a solution for rapid microwave-assisted tissue processing, thus in present days it is successfully applied in histopathologic diagnosis as well in electron microscopy, in certain histochemistry reactions and especially in immunocytochemistry. In this article, using a domestic microwave oven we limited our researches only to study the chemical fixation of samples immersed in formalin.
There were collected samples from compacted organs (liver, kidneys, testicle, and tongue) of three guinea pigs and were fixed using two distinct methods. One samples’ lot was fixed by immersion in 10% neutral formalin during 24 hours at laboratory temperature, and the other samples’ lot was fixed in same fixative solution but using the microwave irradiation for only 20 minutes. After usual inclusion in paraffin and division into sections, was practiced the Hematoxyline-Eosine staining. We had not observed qualitative differences between the two preparations’ lots, neither as concerns the nuclear structural details nor the cytoplasm aspects, but the processing time was significant different.
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