moss - Funaria.hygrometrica, capsule section - first slide

[mrsonchus]

Hi all, I've been trying to section moss capsules and have an early image that you may find interesting. Quite a bit of detail has been caught, more than expected as this slide is made from one of the first 'roughing' sections. I've many more sections to cut, which should be better that this one.
I'm pretty pleased with these sections so far. This one's stained with Safranin and Alcian-blue stains and mounted permanently in 'Omnimount' resin with Cole-Parmer coverslip.
Sectioned at 5µ, I think it's a little too thin and will make the next sections at 10-12µ for a little more morphological detail from the thicker tissue....

ws_capsule section slide 1.jpg (47.09 KiB) Viewed 4340 times

John B.

[ChrisR]

Moss-botherers I know tend to use methylene blue, I think. I wonder if that would be better with thin sections?

[mrsonchus]

Hi Chris, Methylene-blue is a fine stain, especially as it is metachromatic . However, for permanently-mounted slides it is very often prone to fading. Having said that I've another half-dozen of these roughing sections to work with (that's exactly why I make these first sets of sections in fact).
I'm going to use a few different stains and Methylene-blue is now going to be one of them! It's always a nice stain to look at, let's see what it makes of this tissue!

Thanks for looking Chris, John B.

[ChrisR]

metachromatic - I learned a new word!

[mrsonchus]

metachromatic - I learned a new word!

I'm the same - I spend half my time looking-up the terminology!

Thanks Chris, good to have your input old chap.

John B.