Jonathan,

so far noone on the list seems to have a suggestion what stain you
could use. I was wondering if your problem is low contrast of your
material under bright field conditions and whether that this is the
reason why you want the counterstain. If this is the case you could
try DIC or Phase contrast, which greatly improve contrast in
specimen. As I understand you work with fixed material, consequently
the time delay between subsequent images caused by switching between
different set ups would not matter.
Probably your microscope has a cameraport so that you can obtain
photographs of your bright field images and match them with the
fluorescent images gathered on the confocal.
Is this a reasonable suggestion?

Sabine
_______________________________________
Sabine Fischer
DIVISION of BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology
The University of Edinburgh
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