Fixation of tissues

The extent to which these new tissue adhesives and hemostats will influence surgical procedures can be seen in the following analogy. An effective carpenter cannot create a masterpiece without a saw to cut wood, nails to ensure local fixation of separate pieces of wood, and glue to cause broad surface apposition between wood surfaces. Similarly, the surgeon presently uses a scalpel to cut and divide tissues as well as a suture to create local fixation of tissues, but until... 

This type of fixation is often used for cryosections, cell smears and cell monolyers, but can not be recommended for fixation of tissue blocks since acetone and alcohols, as opposed to aldehydes, penetrate tissue poorly. Cryosections, cell smears and cell monolyers after short (for 5 15 min) fixation in alcohols or acetone are usually air-dried (for 1 h or overnight), washed in buffered saline and directly subjected to the immunocytochemical analysis. 

Infants—necropsy including visceral examination, and collection of organ weights and fixation of tissues, for details see Table 6. For a description of visceral examination, the reader is referred to Chapter 14 of this volume. 

One may compensate for over-fixation of tissues by increasing either the duration of HIER by 20-30% of the standard protocol or by increasing the temperature at which epitope retrieval is performed. 

To allow efficient extraction of intact mRNA, it is recommended that alcohol fixatives be used in lieu of cross-linking agents such as paraformaldehyde. In our experience protocols that have been developed for studying paraformaldehyde-fixed paraffin-embedded archival specimens in tandem with RNA amplifications produce low yields of RNA from microdissected brain regions and picked cells. Fixation of tissue with methanol or ethanol preserves immu-noreactivity and mRNA in many cases. Accordingly, we immerse... 

Plastic surgery Closure of skin wound, attachment of skin grafts, fixation of tissue flaps... 

Adhesives technology has two main applications in medicine as considered in this chapter for internal fixation of tissues usually after surgery, and for use on the skin, primarily to hold dressings in place. There are many differences between the requirements of the technology for these applications. 

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