A Simple Correlative Technique for Morphologic and Energy-Dispersive Analysis of Glass-Mounted Paraffin Sections

Abstract

Tissue sections, smears, and many other varied types of specimen are often mounted on glass slides for light microscopic (LM) evaluation and analysis. These same preparations’ using gold/palladiumcoated glass slides as specimen mounts, are also well suited to correlative scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and, energy dispersive X-ray analysis (SEM/EDX). The following short note describes a procedure for glass-mounted specimens that provides slides suitable for combined LM, SEM and SEM/EDX characterization. In addition, the method establishes a specimen-based reference point for the empirical determination of optimum electron probe depth and accelerating voltage for SEM/EDX analysis.For illustrative purposes we used sections of mammalian kidney cortex known to be heavily laden with crystalline deposits of unknown structure and composition.In each sample, birefringent crystalline material was initially observed in hematoxylin and eosinstained paraffin sections using bright field polarized light microscopy (Fig. 1).