Concentrated Methylene blue is available very cheap at pet shops as it is used to treat fungal infections in fish.....Thank you Oliver for making such video....
@@NerdyNEET I have found 3g on ebay for under 10€ Also cheap is relative. If you work in a professional lab then the 400€+ for a vial of alexa fluor is cheap.
@@NerdyNEET Sure, the prices can vary a lot, but it doesn't have to be expensive. Also be aware that a few g of this stuff goes a long way, it really is quite potent, especially since you only need a drop per slide. Of course if your only option is to buy 50g, then that isn't ideal.
Hello, thank you for your great content! Could you please make a video about the different kind of dies, how they differ from one another and which ones you suggest for hobbyists? I am a bit confused about why there are so many dies and i bet their different color is not the only reason to use them.
Hi oliver Can you please make a video on hematoxylin eosin staining with an animal tissue... Im really interested to know how it is done. Also i couldnt find any good videos on youtube that do this.
Can you use methylene blue to stain the onion root tips like you did in the last video? If so, what changes to the procedure would you need to make (particularly about the water bath and acid)?
I put a drop of my own blood on a slide to observe it. I have done this many times before, and it is always interesting to see. Recently I left such a slide sample (small drop, no stain, has a cover slip) out for a few days to see what it would look like. I had no idea what to expect. I could not see any blood cells, but I did notice very interesting looking areas surrounding empty space, and these areas had a very clear high-contrast dark line. I am curious if anyone knows what exactly I'm looking at - is it blood plasma? What happened to the blood cells? Did they evaporate? I have tried to do some research online, but I can't find anything.
Regarding microscope donations, if you could include PayPal as a method of payment then it would make it a much easier and quicker process to make donations. Thank you for another interesting video. I bought some methylene blue a while back and needed this video to encourage me to use it with the chldren!
The Amscope kit I purchased comes with a small bottle of methylene blue "powder" with no instructions. Can someone enlighten me in how to use it? Thanks
So ... why aren't the red blood cells red? I can imagine that they are not the dark saturated color of the drop of blood itself but they seem to be completely colorless in your pictures? Does the methylene blue actually discolor them? This is a great video. I like this kind of "how-to" video's. Keep them coming! Thanks!
Becasue they are so thin that the effect of the red pigment hemoglobin is not visible. The light also goes through the cells and this therefore looks different then light coming from above, where it bounces off. Same with many bacteria, where they look pigmented on a petridish but colorless under the microscope.
@@MicrobehunterMicroscopy It also depends upon conducting a proper blood smear with the edge of a second slide, which gives the effect of a single layer of cells smeared across the slide as opposed to an incorrect smear which pushes the cells together stacking them giving them a reddish color but making them useless for counts or recording any usable observations.
Thank you for your amazing content! I got methylene blue from a pet store. This is used in aquariums to treat fungal infections in fish. It worked really well on cheek cells! I tried this on onion cells, however, while the cell walls got stained, I could not see the nucleus. Any ideas on what could be going on/ how I can fix this?
The 50mls of Methylene Blue I bought is 1% aqueous. I assume that means the 50ml of liquid has 0.5ml of water dilution in it. However, does this mean it is a prepared solution ready straight from the bottle to use as stain with no need to dilute it further? There is no information regarding its use on the bottle I bought.
Methylene blue also is a photosensitizer, an efficient producer of singlet oxygen so that's another thing to have in mind when staining organisms, it can make them very sensitive to light in the 580-700nm range (orange to deep-red).
I have a question. I took my dog to a gentleman to see if my dog was getting close to her heat cycle. He surprised me when he pulled out the microscope 🔬. He had 3 dyes. He dipped the slide after he collected her blood 🩸 into 3 different types of dyes . He put it under the microscope and was looking at her cells . We ended up breeding her and she took . Where can I get those dyes? It was a light blue on a blue one and a red one ? U know what they are called or where can I purchase them?
Chemical supplies shops have it, but if they do not sell to private people, then try to buy from an aquarium shop. Methylene blue is also used as anti-fungus treatment for aquarium fish.
I would use a very low concentration of methylene blue. It is also used for disinfection of aquariums, so at a right concnetration it might not do much harm. generally it is not necessary to stain water samples as the contrast is generally high enough.
@@MicrobehunterMicroscopy can I use my methylene blue that dissolved in water to stain my cells? You used alcohol based methylene blue so I'm concerned that i bought the wrong one, i was also suspicious about it being 1 Litres but couldn't find ANY information on the internet.