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Dear Manuella,
I have recently done some work on tortillas and tortilla dough structure.
Staining was done by adding Safranin O ( I believe it was below 0.05% w/w)
before kneading the dough and eventually baking the tortillas. I have
never seen pink tortillas before - this was fun.
The gluten network stained very nicely (excitation with 488 nm laser,
emission in green). The dough or a hand section through the baked tortilla
was mounted in immersion oil on a slide (I did not want to use water as a
mountant since this would cause swelling) and imaged using a 20x oil
immersion objective. Because the dough is quite dense and the starch
scatters light a lot, I could only get good images first ~20-30 microns
into the tissue. This was still better than with either the dry or water
immersion objectives. Using a different dye excitable with a longer
wavelength laser would help, but this was good enough.
Stan
Dr. Stanislav Vitha
Microscopy and Imaging Center
Texas A&M University
BSBW 119
College Station, TX 77843-2257