Sudan Black B staining is a promising tool for secure localization of alveolar epithelial type II cells and automated proportionator sampling

By means of stereology it is possible to quantify structural parameters within the lung, e.g. the total number of alveolar epithelial type II cells. When using the “density x reference space design” it is necessary to reduce shrinkage during histological processing, so that initial measurements of the total lung volume before processing still correspond to what is seen under the microscope after processing. We recently compared different types of fixation and embedding and found little shrinkage after primary glutaraldehyde/formaldehyde fixation, postfixation with osmium tetroxide and uranyl acetate and embeddin…