The Histologic Science Program at Goodwin University offers various courses required to become a histotechnician or histotechnologist. These courses analyze basic steps of tissue preparation and also provide the possibility to discover “the rainbow” of special stains and their importance in diagnostics. It is my responsibility to assist students by providing reliable educational resources.
Throughout the special stain course, students regularly perform different staining techniques to demonstrate the arrangement of cells and tissue abnormalities connected with diseases, while evaluating the stains' useful aspects prior to the pathologist’s examination. My goal was to find inexpensive alternative control tissues for some staining techniques.
Of the many informal experiments that I conducted, I discovered a new control source for the demonstration of fungus. During the frozen section, students used hot dogs for cutting to eliminate any infections. I placed the rest of the material in the refrigerator and totally forgot about it. After 2 months, I discovered changes in the color of a hot dog stored in the refrigerator at 4 degrees celsius. In order to provide an argument for my theory that fungus had infected the hot dog, the hot dog was cut into 3-4 mm thick sections, fixed in Preserve and processed using our routine overnight processing schedule. Following the routine processing, the hot dog was embedded in paraffin wax, sectioned at 4 microns, deparaffinized, and hydrated in preparation for special stain application.
For this informal research, I used the Periodic Schiff and Grocott Methenamine Silver techniques to demonstrate fungal organisms in the hot dog specimen. Since each of these methods possess their own mechanism of action, the slides were segregated into two groups and immersed in the solutions following the steps of each protocol. As expected, each method yielded positive staining results.
It was noted that the visibility of the fungus colony throughout the hot dog was dissimilar and depended on fungus development and concentration of the hyphae. For both groups of slides, the biggest colony concentration was visible on the edges of the hot dog. Going deeper, the fungus colony was smaller, however, fungus was identified between fat cells and other products of the hot dog.
This informal experiment has significant implications for the development of alternative sources of control tissue used as one of many didactic assets for students in the histology program. A hot dog infected by fungus could serve as a valuable alternative for conventional fungus control tissue, not only in HT programs, but in the clinical sites also, especially given that we received positive staining results for both PAS and GMS techniques.
Written By: Joanna B. Pliszka, MS, HT (ASCP)CM
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