Hi. I have a question regards bouin's fixative. What are the drawbacks fo fixing e.g mice heart samples for longer period (say 1-2 weeks)? Do I need to adopt some protocol to get good tissue sections after this long fixation in bouin's?
Hello,
This fixative is not the best choice for the heart, especially. We obtained bad results, using it on small pieces of heart and muscles even for routine histology staining. Parts of the samples were burnt. And the fixation period was for 24 hours. May be it works better for larger organs. I prefer 10% neutralized formaldehyde.
Extensive Bouin fixation will result in a harder material to slice (more technical artifacts such as "crumbing") and more "fixative" artifacts such as nuclear homogeneous hyperchromasia which will make chromatin analysis less precise.
As advised by Slavi; 10% formaldehyde is better for molecular techniques (Bouin tends to glue the DNA strands together rending dehybridization difficult or impossible). Historically, Bouin short fixation was better for nuclear morphology.
10% formaline is better for routein histological diagnosis and research work.
we prefare Bouin's soloution for studying spermatogenesis in testicular samples.