In this article (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22469996), researchers used only a portion of a fiber for fiber typing and the rest for further analysis.

Dear Siacia Broos,

since your question had only one reply very recently since January 2013 I would like to perhaps help you with some suggestion(s). The problem is that there are a lot of papers dealing with Muscle fibres and SEM, but more/less related to either "general" aspects of view or "Localization of Neuromuscular Junction regions", but not specifically doing fiber/fibre typing by Scanning Electron Microscopy. I was not able to localize any article / paper related intimately to your request (also searching PubMed for instance) .

The Reference given by my Fore-Poster Anthony Ciccone seems not to be what you really are looking for.

So the only help I can offer is (this might be turn out to create hours of search and "severe" documentation work, I know (;-)) ) to search Google for the following search phrases (as you can see, number of results decreases with limitations in search phrase):

GOOGLE Search:

< muscle fiber typ* or classification AND Scanning Electron Microsc* > 3.130.000 results (look always for "fibre" and "fiber" too),

< muscle fibre typ* or classification AND Scanning Electron > 2.590.000 results, "skeletal muscle fibre" typing AND Scanning Electron Microsc* 414.000 results,

< muscle fiber typing AND Scanning Electron > 254.000 results,

< muscle fibre typing AND Scanning Electron Microsc* > 158.000 results. I have seen that there are some interesting articles also dealing with fibre typing before/parallel to EM (e.g. TEM, but sometimes SEM as well) but I guess that it will be hard to find any article dealing with fiber/fibre typing/classification only by SEM-technique). If you the find the one or other article which fits into your original request profile, then you might choose other, more specified search phrases (for Google as well as PubMed)...

You have not said anything about the techniques you would like to use for your task: i.e. e.g. only "pure, classical SEM of fibres", freeze drying (FD) or Freeze substitution (FS) and / or freeze fracture (FF)-preps" etc., the latter I think would be necessary to localize a Z-band (you know differences between fiber type-associated Z-Bands already? what about preparatory conditions to prevent artefactual contracture of muscle fibres??, etc.).

What I only could imagine would be: a) FD-FS-FF, b) having many looks into your fibre surfaces and Z-Bands with documentation c) afterwards reembedding your small samples into either paraffin and/or resin, cutting histological sections and/or semithins, IHC-stains for fibre types (with these you could see at least some kind of fibre types/fibre type patterns) & ultrathins for correlative TEM). Another way round would be perhaps (as a trial) Pre-embedding IHC of fibre types, different gold labels and examining FD-FS-FF-specimens by SEM-modes (BSE, SE, etc.).

AS concerning your question please consult major handbooks in (diagnostic) Muscle Pathology. Best regards and good luck!