I want to know if just distilled water would be fine for this purpose or should I go for something like Phosphate buffered saline? My ultimate aim is to freeze-dry the fungal hyphae for SEM analysis. Apart from this, a colleague of mine also told me that after being separated from the growth media, the fungal hyphae have a chance of experiencing environmental stress. So, in that case, can washing the fungal hyphae repeatedly to remove the growth media (which would be a time taking process) have an undesired impact on the SEM analysis results (in terms of the morphology of the hyphae as in shrunken hyphae etc)?
If the ultimate goal is to freeze-dry the fungal hyphae, I would recommend washing the samples thoroughly with PBS for optimum physiological conditions. PBS generally protects biological samples from stresses due to optimum isotonicity and pH. However, to avoid having PBS crystals in your SEM images, I would also recommend washing the hyphae with water once after all the media is removed.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Physical Sciences
- Condensed Matter Physics
- Soft Matter
- Liquids