If you would like to obtain morphometrical evaluation, labeling technique of
bome must be employed. The fluorescent dye are used for labeling of bone. Te
tracycline is a normal dye for this purpose and is used for clinical situati
on in human. Tetracycline, however, is difficult to observe in undecalcified
bone section by CLSM, beacause its fluorescent spectra is not fit for laser
with 488nm, 568nm and 647nm. If you get more dose, you can observe labeling
in bone, but literature describe that overdose of tetracycline impair the bo
ne mineralization and consequently formation of bone will be disturbed. In a
n experimantal condition used small animals, calcein, alizarin red S, xylino
l orange and other fluorescent dye are used other than tetracycline and thes
e dye could be visible by CLSM. You may refer our rescent paper (Suzuki et a
l. Bone, 21(6), 507-517, 1997).
Hope to help you by this comment.

Prof. Keiichi Ohya
Dept. Dental Pharmacology, Fac. Dentistry
Tokyo Medical and Dental University
tel +81-3-5803-5460
FAX +81-3-5803-0190
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At 0:20 PM 98.9.23, Felicity Lawrence wrote:

> Basically, I have a post-grad student who would like to assess the
> architecture of bone (compact and spongy).  She is looking for a fluorescent
> dye that will enable imaging.  She doesn't need to disctiminate between the
> different cell populations but rather is looking at the arrangement of
> trabeculae, etc.  We have a krypton/argon laser with 488nm, 568nm and 647nm
> excitation.  We have a number of filters available for detecting emmision on
> our Leica TCS4d CLSM.
>