I need to take puncture from frozen pig brain slice. What tool and what technique will be most appropriate in order to keep the slice from braking?
I've not worked with brain, but have been using disposable biopsy punches on frozen liver samples. The sample is often wedged into the biopsy punch, but I use a PBS rinse anyway, so after placing the end of the tool in the PBS the sample has thawed enough at the edges to fall out or gently remove with forceps. I've found the frozen samples certainly cause faster dulling of punches, so reusable (even high quality) punches will lead to more crushing. On fresh livers we could probably punch 20 samples before symptoms of a dull punch, on frozen it's more like 2-3, so I just use a fresh punch for each sample.
Below is a link to the product I use, but I'm sure brand is not critical:
https://www.thomassci.com/Equipment/Animal-Handling/_/Disposable-Biopsy-Punches?q=Biopsy%20Punch
Thank you, unfortunately, I can't use this technique, taking punch with biopsy punches will make the sample shutter and break, and I need them for couple of punches
Hello, I'm currently having the same problem where my frozen OCT embedded samples crumble when punch biopsied. Did you ever find a solution?
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