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That's very strange.  The beads are suspended in deionized water with 
sodium azide so one would not expect that a dilution could damage them. 
I usually just vortex the tube, spread the beads on the coverslip straight 
out of the tube, air dried and mounted in glycerol.  The prep will have 
clusters but enough singles to work on, and usually last over a year.  I 
did see some serious leaching if I mounted them in Nikon immersion oil. 
These are beads from the sampling kit (T7284).

--
Pang (Wai Pang Chan, [log in to unmask], PAB A087, 206-685-1519)
The Biology Imaging Facility (http://staff.washington.edu/wpchan/if/)

On Fri, 29 Jun 2007, Sarah Kefayati wrote:

> Search the CONFOCAL archive at
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
> Greetings all:
>
> I have faced a problem imaging tetraspecks beads,I prepared two
> samples about 8 days ago,one without diluting the beads and the other
> one diluted by 10x in water,the first one is still working well but I
> can get good data from that because most of the beads are clustered
> ,but for the second one(diluted with water),I could get very good data
> but it seems that water has been extracting the dyes from beads and
> they losing fluorescence and I'm getting very noisy background,.
> I'm just wondering if you know any other technique to prepare the
> sample that can gives us good data and still works for weeks?
>
> thanks all
> Sarah
>