Jon,
Plants are full of autofluorescence. If you cut a section (a
careful hand section is fine) of a stem or root, most times you will
see lovely fluorescence. What is nice about this is that you can have
students collect their own matieral, try different places on the
plant, aged material, etc etc. It takes a little knack to cut nice
smooth hand sections so they coverslip up nice and show good images
near the coverslip. You don't have to stain at all, just mount and
observe. There can also be nice differences at different wavelengths.
Have fun,
Tobias
At 8:45 AM -0800 11/14/08, Jonathan M Krupp wrote:
>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
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