Twenty years of histochemistry in the third millennium, browsing the scientific literature

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, about 240,000 articles where histochemical techniques were used have been published in indexed journals, and their yearly number has progressively increased. The histochemical approach was selected by researchers with very different scientific interests, as the journals in which these articles were published fall within 140 subject categories. The relative proportion of articles in some of these journal categories did change over the years, and browsing the table of contents of the European Journal of Histochemistry, as an example of a strictly histochemical journal, it appeared that in recent years histochemical techniques were preferentially used to mechanistically investigate natural or experimentally induced dynamic processes, with reduced attention to purely descriptive works. It may be foreseen that, in the future, histochemistry will be increasingly focused on studying the molecular pathways responsible for cell differentiation, the maintenance or loss of the differentiated state, and tissue regeneration.

Expanding the toolset of fluorescent covalent staining of biological samples by labeling carboxylate and phosphate groups

“…Histochemical stains are important techniques used for the visualization of biological structures and serve as the cornerstones for diagnosis and research [1]. However, traditional histochemical stains such as hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) and periodic acid‐Schiff (PAS) cannot meet the increasing demands for volumetric 3D imaging and super resolution fluorescence microscopy on biological samples, since they can only be optimally visualized in thin sections and under bright‐field illumination.…”