Several years ago, I tried Ethidium Homodimer plus a wide range of other DNA
probes (EB, AO, PI, Quinacrine, 7-Actinomycin-D etc.) for looking at
heterochromatin in insect epidermis.  It worked well but I doubt if it is
worth the extra expense.  Hoechst and DAPI are by far the nicest if you have
access to a good UV system.  But at the time we didn't, and ended up using
good old Propidium Iodide.

We treated with RNAse first (1mg/ml in buffer for 4 hours warm, or overnight
in the fridge) and had to try a range of strengths before we settled on 20uM.
 Preparations can be dehydrated in alcohol, cleared, and mounted in DPX (or
an antifade equivalent), then looked at through a good oil objective.

Recently, I have had good success with the  TOPRO series from Molecular
Probes.  These I would recommend as they are simple to use (1ug/ml for 10
minutes), have good sharp excitation peaks, and usually don't need RNAse
pre-treatment.
TOPRO-1 is excited at 488 and emits at 515.
TOPRO-3 is excited at 647 and emits deep red.
There are many other colors, so you can optimize your other channels in a
multilabel experiment, then pick the DNA probe which best fits between them.
 (I have no vested interest in these products, but am involved in the sale
and support of confocal systems).

Hope this helps

David Carter
oQQQQQ@

Meridian Instruments Inc.
Makes three lines of CLSM
Ultima InSight and /TR
2310 Science Parkway
Okemos MI 48864
517 349 7200
Fax 349 5967