We recently performed histological wax infiltration of tissue samples in glass beakers. But it is difficult to completely clean off the wax that is stuck on the beakers. We have tried heating but some wax still remains stuck. Does anyone have an easy solution to this problem?
Thanks!
I will try it. Some people recommend adding water and heating it so that wax melts and upon cooling it floats on water. I will try both methods as we have lots beakers rendered unusable to stuck wax.
It works well! Does one need to clean with alcohol and then with water? Otherwise cleaning with Xylene and later with detergent seems fine. Thanks!
If the beakers are small enough and you have access to an ultrasound-cleaner, you can put it into some dishwasher-water at 40 °C and clean it for 15 min. The paraffin should swim to the surface.
We do this with our embedding molds.
The methods using heating intervention work well but if you could' not do it for any reason, you can try xylene with different baths to remove entirely wax.
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