page_title: Microtechnique
section_title: Embedding
hierarchical_section_title: Microtechnique / Methods used in plant micro-experiments / Embedding
caption_attribution_description: Tissue sections on slides are stained using hematoxylin and eosin on an automated stainer. This is the routine "H&amp;E" stain, which is used on almost all specimens. Hematoxylin, which is blue or purple, stains mostly nuclei, while the pink to orange eosin stains cytoplasm, nucleoli, and extracellular substances like collagen. After staining, the processor takes the slides through a dehydrating solvent, usually alcohol or acetone, and then into a "clearing agent" either xylene or a citrus-smelling substance called Americlear. Sometimes it is necessary to supplement the H&amp;E with "special stains" or "immunostains"
context_page_description: Microtechnique is an aggregate of methods used to prepare micro-objects for studying. It is currently being employed in many fields in life science. Two well-known branches of microtechnique are botanical microtechnique and zoological microtechnique.
  With respect to both plant microtechnique and animal microtechnique, four types of methods are commonly used, which are whole mounts, smears, squashes, and sections, in recent micro experiments. Plant microtechnique contains direct macroscopic examinations, freehand sections, clearing, maceration, embedding, and staining. Moreover, three preparation ways used in zoological micro observations are paraffin method, celloidin method, and freezing method.
context_section_description: Main article: Histology
  Embedding technique is a medium stage when doing a sectioning process.  When preparing specimens, it is difficult to make uniform slices since the tissue is soft. Therefore, it is necessary to soak the tissue with a certain substance to harden the whole tissue, to facilitate the slicing. This process is called embedding. The substance used to embed tissue is embedding media, which is chosen depends on the category of the microscope, category of the micro tome, and category of tissue. Paraffin wax, whose melting point is from 56 to 62℃, is commonly used for embedding.
caption: Tissue processing - Tissue sections on slides are stained on an automated stainer
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