Ted Pella, Inc. | Quantitative Assessment of the PELCO BioWave® Pro + for Rapid Immunofluorescence Labelling of Thick Specimens

Booth 2018

While it is well established that the use of microwave energy can benefit tissue preservation during fixation and vastly speed up specimen preparation in electron microscopy workflows, the use of microwaves for immunofluorescence staining of harder to label thicker samples has not been utilized much in the literature. In part, this is likely due to the lack of quantitative studies comparing standard benchtop workflows to those assisted by microwaves. In this study we quantitatively compare standard benchtop protocols with microwave-assisted, utilizing the PELCO BioWave® Pro + system, on spheroids growing in various thick 3D hydrogel matrices. Our results show that the use of microwaves can decrease antibody staining times by a factor approaching 10x while maintaining cellular and matrix structure.