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Making a Permanent Mounted Slide
Karen

创建者

Karen

23. 九月 2026SE
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Making a Permanent Mounted Slide

A drop of pond water under a coverslip is a wet mount, and it has about twenty minutes to live. The water creeps out, the coverslip drifts, air pushes in from the edges, and whatever you found is gone before you can show it to anyone. A permanent mount replaces the water with a resin that sets clear and hard, sealing the specimen between glass forever. Victorian slide-makers turned this into an industry — there are mounted diatom arrangements from the 1870s that are still perfect — and the chemistry has barely changed. The reason it works is not just preservation. The mounting medium is chosen to have a refractive index close to glass, so the specimen stops scattering light at every boundary and detail that was lost in glare simply appears. A good mount makes a specimen LOOK better, not only last longer.
初学者
3 hours

说明

1

Clean the glass properly

Wash slides and coverslips in detergent, rinse, dip in alcohol and dry with a lint-free cloth. Handle them by the edges only. Grease makes the mountant pull away into islands as it dries, leaving a permanently ruined slide that looks fine while it is wet. A fingerprint at 400× is a landscape. This is the same lesson as cleaning a TLC plate, and it fails the same way: silently, later, and only after you have done all the other work.

此步骤所需材料:

载玻片及盖玻片载玻片及盖玻片20 个
乙醇——实验级,95 %乙醇——实验级,95 %100 毫升

所需工具:

丁腈手套丁腈手套
2

Fix the specimen so it stops changing

Soak the specimen in a fixative — formalin, or a simple alcohol-acetic acid mixture — for long enough to reach the middle of it. Thin material needs minutes, thick material needs hours. Fixing cross-links the proteins so the tissue stops decaying and holds its shape through everything that follows. Skip it and your beautiful section turns to mush in the alcohol. Work with formalin only in good ventilation and gloves — the vapour is an irritant and a sensitiser, and an alcohol-acetic fixative is perfectly adequate for plant material.

此步骤所需材料:

甲醛溶液(37 % 福尔马林)甲醛溶液(37 % 福尔马林)50 毫升
乙醇——实验级,95 %乙醇——实验级,95 %200 毫升
乙酸(冰醋酸)乙酸(冰醋酸)20 毫升

所需工具:

玻璃罐玻璃罐
丁腈手套丁腈手套
密闭式护目镜密闭式护目镜
3

Dehydrate in steps, never in one jump

Move the specimen up a series of alcohol baths — 30, 50, 70, 90 and finally 100 per cent — giving it time in each. Water and resin do not mix, so every trace of water must go before mounting. But dropping wet tissue straight into absolute alcohol pulls water out so fast that cells shrink and distort, and delicate structures collapse. The graded series is slow and it is the difference between a section that looks like tissue and one that looks like a raisin.

此步骤所需材料:

乙醇——实验级,95 %乙醇——实验级,95 %500 毫升

所需工具:

玻璃罐玻璃罐
秒表秒表
4

Mount without trapping air

Put a single small drop of mountant on the slide, lower the coverslip from one edge at a shallow angle, and let it fall the rest of the way under its own weight. Dropping it flat traps a sheet of bubbles that you will never get out. Lowering from one edge pushes the air ahead of the advancing liquid. Use less mountant than feels right: too much oozes out and takes weeks to harden, too little pulls air in from the edges as it shrinks. One small drop for a standard coverslip.

此步骤所需材料:

显微镜封片剂显微镜封片剂10 毫升

所需工具:

带刻度移液管(莫尔式)带刻度移液管(莫尔式)
5

Dry it flat, and label it immediately

Lay the slide flat, somewhere warm and dust-free, for days to weeks depending on the mountant. Write the label as soon as the coverslip is down. Tilted slides let the coverslip creep and the specimen ends up off-centre or half out. And an unlabelled slide is worthless within a month — you will not remember what it was, where it came from or how it was stained. Species or material, source, date, fixative, stain: five fields, thirty seconds, and the slide stays useful for a century.
6

Why the mountant makes things visible

正在加载 Jupyter 笔记本…

此步骤所需材料:

甘油(植物性)甘油(植物性)50 毫升
7

Ring the semi-permanent mounts

For a glycerol or water mount, paint a ring of clear nail varnish around the coverslip edge in two thin coats, letting the first dry. The ring does two jobs: it stops evaporation and it glues the coverslip down so an objective cannot drag it. Two thin coats beat one thick one, which shrinks as it dries and pulls away from the glass. Victorian mounters made this decorative — coloured rings and gilt paper — and the practical version is exactly the same thing without the flourish.

材料

6

所需工具

5

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