Dear Jon,

A lot of house hold products show very bride fluorescence. If you take  
a white T-shirt, the whitener in the washing powder will make the  
contton fibers bride fluorescent for UV.
Most textile dyes are fluorescent also, so you can have choice.

Pollen from plants are also fluorescent. Bye e.g. lilies, give them to  
your love, but take the pollen of before. This will also improve the  
shelf-live of your flowers when put in water. To prepare these pollen,  
let them dry, and mount in immersion oil or non fluorescent glycerine.

Finally the paper of euro's and also very frequently some stamps  
fluoresce. You can check that by illuminating them with blacklight as  
used in the disco.

It is amazing to test all different products, because even the human  
hair, washed with colored shampoo, will show autofluorescence coming  
from the dye in the shampoo, on the other hand, hair from wild animals  
will in general not fluoresce.

Bye,

Patrick
Dep. Molecular Biotechnology
Ghent University
Coupure links 653
9000 GENT (Belgium)

Quoting Jonathan M Krupp <[log in to unmask]>:

> Hi:
>
> This is a pretty basic and simple question. I need some advice about
> rounding up some samples to use in an elementary light microscopy class
> that includes basic fluorescence.
>
> I am at a community college and my background is in EM and brightfield
> LM. I have a passing familiarity with confocal et al but not enough to
> know much. I maintained a confocal, but never ran experiments or
> prepared much in the way of samples. Now I have to get something
> together to demonstrate the fundamentals of fluorescence to students in
> a new job.
>
> I have been relying on chlorophyll autofluorescence up til now, but
> would like to add anything that would be easy to do. We have a simple
> scope with filters for FITC, rhodamine, and DAPI, I think. What would
> be some fool proof, easy to get samples to try?
>
> In addition, I would eventually like to add some kind of confocal
> experience to this class, any ideas about where to find an inexpensive
> system would be great.
>
> Thanks
>
> Jon
> San Joaquin Delta College
> Stockton, CA 95207
> [log in to unmask]



-- 
Dep. Moleculaire Biotechnologie
Coupure links 653
B 9000 GENT

tel 09 264 5969
fax 09 264 6219