how thickness of skin you want to get?..if lower than 2.5 mm, maybe you can try the OCT for living image, the accuracy about 0.1 micronmeter. if not, you can try the wet-SEM for your sample to get high quality image
I don't want to get deeper. Just the surface profile and look for living organisms like bacteria, fungi etc
The problem with looking for bacteria, and fungi is that they will probably be removed by the preparation procedures that you will need to do. Of course there will be a trade off between sample morphology quality and preservation of surface material like bugs and fungi. I would suggest snap freezing the tissue in liquid N2 or on dry ice, then lyophilization prior to sputter coating.
OR... Use a strong fixative like 4% Gluteraldehyde (GA) overnight, followed by dehydration in graded methanols, CDP then coating. The GA works pretty quickly so it may fix the bacteria in place.
OR.. use pubmed before asking questions and do what these people did PMCID:PMC3262537
Low vacuum mode does not preserve wet specimens. You will work at pressure about 1 Torr in contrast to atmospheric pressure of 760 Torr. So pressure in the specimen chamber will be just 1/760 of the atmospheric pressure, about the same as for high vacuum mode. The same is true for water – residual partial water vapor pressure will be just 1/760 of normal one, so water will evaporate as fast as in high vacuum mode and specimen will dry out really fast. If you do not have ESEM capabilities you’d better work in high vac mode. Best preservation of surface – no specimen treatment at all. Just air dry it and coat with either Au or C (Au could be better). Sure, bacteria morphology will be not as good as after proper preparation (fixation, dehydration, etc.), but even air dried bacteria and fungus are still very much recognizable. If your main problem (as I understand) is preservation of organisms on a surface, then do not treat it with solvents at all!
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