Profile analysis of hepatic porcine and murine brain tissue slices obtained with a vibratome

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1 Research Center ''E. Piaggio'', University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
2 Research Center "E. Piaggio", University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
3 Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council, Pisa, Italy
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.561v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Bioengineering, Anatomy and Physiology, Science and Medical Education, Histology
Keywords
brain, vibratome, liver, precision-cut slices, graphical user interface
Copyright
© 2014 Mattei et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Mattei G, Cristiani I, Magliaro C, Ahluwalia A. 2014. Profile analysis of hepatic porcine and murine brain tissue slices obtained with a vibratome. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e561v1

Abstract

This study is aimed at characterizing soft tissue slices using a vibratome. In particular, the effect of two sectioning parameters (i.e. step size and sectioning speed) on resultant slice thickness was investigated for fresh porcine liver as well as for paraformaldehyde-fixed (PFA-fixed) and fresh murine brain. A simple framework for embedding, sectioning and imaging the slices was established to derive their thickness, which was evaluated through a purposely developed graphical user interface. Sectioning speed and step size had little effect on the thickness of fresh liver slices. Conversely, the thickness of PFA-fixed murine brain slices was found to be dependent on the step size, but not on the sectioning speed. In view of these results, fresh brain tissue was sliced varying the step size only, which was found to have a significant effect on resultant slice thickness. Although precision-cut slices (i.e. with regular thickness) were obtained for all the tissues, slice accuracy (defined as the match between the nominal step size chosen and the actual slice thickness obtained) was found to increase with tissue stiffness from fresh liver to PFA-fixed brain. This quantitative investigation can be very helpful for establishing the most suitable slicing setup for a given tissue.