A specimen is very difficult to cut and appears small. What happened?

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Multiple Choice

A specimen is very difficult to cut and appears small. What happened?

Prolonged fixation drives more cross-linking of tissue proteins, stiffening the specimen and making it brittle. When the tissue sits too long in fixative—especially in a fixative that isn’t well suited for that tissue—the cross-linking and subsequent dehydration/embedding steps cause noticeable shrinkage. The result is a specimen that is hard to cut and appears smaller after processing. This combination of brittleness and shrinkage from extended fixation best explains the observed difficulty in sectioning and the reduced size, more so than issues from processing alone or from inadequate infiltration.

Prolonged fixation drives more cross-linking of tissue proteins, stiffening the specimen and making it brittle. When the tissue sits too long in fixative—especially in a fixative that isn’t well suited for that tissue—the cross-linking and subsequent dehydration/embedding steps cause noticeable shrinkage. The result is a specimen that is hard to cut and appears smaller after processing. This combination of brittleness and shrinkage from extended fixation best explains the observed difficulty in sectioning and the reduced size, more so than issues from processing alone or from inadequate infiltration.

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