Practical Histochemistry, 2nd Edition

Many applied biological and medical scientists have asked how they could apply histochemistry to their particular studies. Often their questions were purely technical - how to stain for a particular enzyme or substance. They saw histochemistry as an extension of hisology and they wanted a well established recipe. They did not want to go into the science underlying the staining method any more than they did when applying special stains in histology. This book aims to give them a technique that they can follow as simply as a routine histological method which has a scientific basis. Other workers had problems in tissue metabolism and chemical dysfunction. For these, histochemistry was an extension of biochemistry. Its special advantages were that it allowed them to relate a specific activity to a particular tissue component and it was a form of biochemistry that could be done on relatively minute pieces of tissue such as could be removed safely by biopsy, or could be kept either in maintenance or proliferative culture. But they too did not want to delve into the variants that can be found for almost every histochemical reaction. This book is a collection of histochemical reactions with simple techniques which, if followed precisely, will yield reactions where the reactive compounds or enzymes are present, and will give a measure of the degree of activity actually shown in the tissue at the time of its removal, and can also indicate the total activity of which the tissue could be capable.