Lanthanum Staining of the Surface Coat of Cells

Abstract

Among the techniques which have been reported to stain the surface coat of cells, for electron microscopy, is lanthanum staining en bloc . Similarly, the presence of the cationic dye, Alcian blue 8GX, in a primary glutaraldehyde fixative has been reported to improve the preservation of the surface coat of cells of many types ; however, the preserved coat is not very electron opaque unless thin sections are counterstained . The present paper shows that for several rat tissues lanthanum staining en bloc is an effective electron stain for the cell surface, giving excellent contrast, if combined sequentially with prefixation in an aldehyde fixative containing Alcian blue . The cationic substance cetylpyridinium chloride was found to have a similar effect to that of Alcian blue in enhancing the lanthanum staining of the surface coat material of the brush border of intestinal epithelial cells . The patterns of lanthanum staining obtained for the tissues studied strikingly resemble those reported in the literature where tissues are stained by several standard methods for demonstrating mucosubstances at the ultrastructural level . This fact and the reproduction of the effect of Alcian blue by cetylpyridinium chloride constitute a persuasive empirical argument that the material visualized is a mucopolysaccharide or mucopolysaccharide-protein complex .

Selective Deposition of Lanthanum in Mammalian Cardiac Cell Membranes

“…Revel and Karnovsky (19) used colloidal lanthanum to identify a previously undetected 20 A intercellular space at the gap junctions of mouse heart and liver ; we later obtained similar findings in a variety of epithelial and myocardial tissues (13,15,16) . Colloidal lanthanum has also been used to stain certain components of the surface of embryonic (9,10,14,21) and differentiated cells (22) .…”

The position and morphology of honeycombs in normal skeletal muscle fibres of the healthy frog

“…T-system, caveolae and honeycombs, means that the same conditions for their formation must dominate there. The T-system contains a matrix of proteoglycans [20], which could act as binding sites for lanthanum [21,22]. On the other hand, it can be shown that the formation of lanthanum precipitates on the cell Fig.…”

Glycocalyx Regeneration and Intercellular Junction Formation in Reaggregates of Embryonic Myocardial Cells

“…It has been shown previously that a material which is produced at the cell surface and seems to be a Moscona, 1973). The markers used in this study are known to stain acid mucopolysaccharides on the cell surface (Luft, 1971a, b; Shea, 1971). Thus, we believe that the staining material could aid in cell adhesion.…”

“…In order to visualize the polysaccharide (Shea, 1971), which are commonly used as ultrastructural indicators of acid mucopolysaccaride.…”