Gary Radice
Radice@urvax.urich.edu

A high speed pellet will often stay intact after glutaraldehyde fixation, if andled gently. The are also usually thin enought that they do not need to be resuspended during each fluid change. Subsequents steps of osmication and dehydration also firm up the pellet so that it can be left in place until the fianl embedding. The alternative, for the nervous scientist, is to suspend the pellet in a small drop of low gelling temp. agarose, chill it in the frig and then handle the agarose chunk like a piece of tissue. there are some other approaches as well, but these are the one we routinely use for this purpose

Greg Erdos
gwe@biotech.ufl.edu