I’ve done many poster presentations as part of student academic conferences and to display research that I’ve done. I really enjoy going to conferences, but being outside any research, it’s difficult to afford them these days.
Many of the presentations below were for the student academic conference which occurs at the end of a semester for students to show off the research work they participated in during the year. These were great places to talk about under-explored areas of sciences. Some were dead ends, while others were quite fascinating.
Please check out some of the posters I’ve made below. Some are in power point format, but the slides from the power point presentation were printed on a poster as talking points.
While I was attending Minnesota State University: Moorhead (MSUM), one of my summer projects was seining fish with Linda Fuselier. We spent many hours in the field gathering specimens and identifying them. It was a great experience and the guide may still be available for sale at the Buffalo River Science Center just east of Moorhead, MN.
When this instrument came into the lab, I was sent to the Tucson location of Ventana Medical Systems for training on this instrument. It’s a completely modular system that is easy to fix by simply replacing the system that is broken. Just like the Benchmark XT, these machines pretty much ran non-stop during the operating hours in the lab. Many people fault this machine because it does break down because of the complicated transportation system it employs, but it’s easily fixed by a Ventana representative by simply replacing modules.
These are the most widely used IHC stainers in histology. These machines were kept operating on a 24hour basis 7 days a week. They only came down for maintenance, repair, and decontamination. I’m really surprised that they didn’t break down more. Ventana reps were always fixing them, but only because they basically operated non-stop since they hit the production floor. Amazing work horse machine that does beautiful staining.
I was also in charge of doing decontaminations on these instruments.
I didn’t a chance to use this system that often. It operated like a benchmark XT, but with more flexibility over what it could stain on each slide. Caris Lifesciences was starting to utilize CISH staining, and this machine was quite often used for that, or repeat IHC slides.
I was in charge of doing the decontaminations on this machine. Ventana made it pretty simple to do.
Sakura Tissue-Tek Prisma Stainer utilizing dip cup staining
This instrument was used for many different applications at Caris Lifesciences. We first used it to stain H&Es, but that was replaced when we got a Ventana Symphony. Then we used it for random stains and things, but finally ended up staining nuclear fast red (NFR) stain in it to preempt microdissection. It’s an easy to use stainer since there are no complicated mechanisms, nozzles, or equipment. There’s an arm that pulls up slides in a basket and dips them in a cup. Maintenance was easy on it as well. Each day the reagents are dumped out and new ones added to the cups. The software was pretty easy to use as well.
The Sakura Tissue-Tek Film Coverslipper was used extensively in the lab. It operated great, once it was cleaned, and coverslipped all of our slides. This machine is a workhorse and I would highly recommend its use. There is only one drawback to the system, the stickers we used to identify each slide, had a xylene soluble adhesive which would soften and gum up a lot of the moving parts the slide touched in this machine. So once a week, or more often depending on workflow, the machine needed to be thoroughly cleaned. Most people did not know how to do this, so it usually came down to me to make it happen.
Once of the drawbacks of the film vs glass coverslipping is longevity. The film remains clear for only so long, whereas the glass ones are indefinite, or until the adhesive drys out. We rarely needed to use glass coverslips, and only then on broken already stained slides.
Aside from the RM2235 manual microtome, I’ve used one of these extensively. I’m not sure that anyone in the histology field actually uses the foot petal to automatically rotate the microtome. When cutting samples you need to be able to feel how the specimen is cutting, which you can not if you aren’t manually operating the rotary mechanism. This instrument does provide very smooth, less noisy, cutting action. I really like using these microtomes. Both the RM2235 and this RM2255 work excellently for cutting the specimens we received at Caris Lifesciences.
Tissue processing is a technique used to desiccate tissue using alcohol. The tissue still needs to have some water in it though, otherwise it would just be as hard as a rock and impossible to cut. There is also the possibility of the tissue receiving incomplete dehydration due to the thickness of the tissue. If it’s too thick, the alcohol can’t penetrate far enough into the tissue. Thankfully, if the gross dissection was done properly, the tissue was just the right size for our validated processes.
This is a Sakura Tissue-Tek tissue processor similar to the one Caris used
We used automated tissue processors at Caris Lifesciences, but they were validated using hundreds of samples to make sure that the process worked well. We had several different run profiles that would work for large samples, medium samples, and small samples. The only thing that changes between the profiles is the length of time that the tissue sits in the alcohol. The alcohol is used to dry the tissue, then it goes through steps of xylene which removes the alcohol from the tissue. Depending on the process, this can happen multiple times, or the xylene can be introduced as the final step before paraffin infiltration. The final step of tissue processing is the introduction of paraffin. The paraffin is usually pressurized to help infiltrate into the tissue. This is usually the longest step and important for successful microtomy.
Plastic cassettes used in the tissue processor. On the side facing the photographer, there is a little plastic mesh door that is closed over the tissue so the tissue doesn’t escape during tissue processing
The tissue processing we did required that the tissue already be fixed in formalin. We didn’t have a process for doing fresh tissue, since the company never had to deal with it. There were some times that we were trying to process cytological specimens, and those were difficult to get processed. We would have had to validate a new process for those, but that didn’t happen while I was employed there.
