I am a post doc. at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and I would be interested in examining some male tails, more specifically the rays, under the microscope. Until now I have just picked worms and placed them in a drop of NaA2 solution on a small agar pad and looked at them. However, not very many animals are positioned in a way so that all the ray are visible. Some publication show really good pictures of male tails with all the rays spread out in a nice way. I was wondering if there was a way to mount the animals on the slide so that the rays are spread out?
hi
This is Agnes from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I’m a PG working in a lab working on male tail ray development. I hope my suggestions can help.
First of all, I suggest using concentrated agar pad, like up to 4-5%, couple with a little drop of M9, as little as possible. This will make sure the worm is not moving, and the surface tension generated by the solution between the cover slide and agar pad will ‘spread’ the fan and the rays nicely.
If you’d like to take photos, I suggest only mount one or two worms onto the agar pad. So the worms won’t stick together.
None of the papers that I’ve seen specifically say how the worms are turned ventral side up. Is it just a matter of moving the cover slip? Doing that doesn’t tend to rotate the worms for me once they’re anesthetized.