The first:

This is the first of what will probably be many posts. Today I took a sample of bone and meat from a steak in to look at. Dr. Ayers gave Tshering and I some background on the difficulties of staining collagen, and then we did a little bit of messing around with a microscope. As predicted we did not have much luck getting collagen fibers to pick up the stain (Coomassie brilliant blue I believe). We also found that some sort of fungus had made it's home in the stain! Although it looked pretty cool under the microscope, it wasn't exactly what we were hoping for. I took some pictures, some even turned out okay. I will try to post a few eventually!

I just did a little looking around on the web and found this amazing site . Called the "Virtual Histology Lab" it lists dozens of stains and what they stain for. Apparently we need to get our hands on some Saffron, aniline blue, and potassium iodine. Some of these pictures are really amazing (maybe I won't post mine after all.....)