Next, we wash the coverslips extensively in distilled water to remove all the glutaraldehyde, (plus all the salts, sugars, etc) before quick-freezing them by impact against a pure copper block at 4 degrees Kelvin. (The reason for the water-wash, which is the most problematic step in the whole procedure, is that ANY residual salt or sugar at all leaves an unacceptable "scum" on the membranes after freeze drying.) Then we freeze-dry the coverslips at minus 80 degrees Celsius for 15 min, "replicate" them with a thin coating of 2nm of platinum, and view them in the electron microscope.
Unfortunately, we can never tell people the first time how much material to send us. We need a total of at least 100ul for each variable we want to try out, but how readily they will adsorb to the glass is an unknown. The best place to start is usually for you to send us about HALF of one of your usual preps, and you to keep the other half for your own biochemical analysis.
Please send them to our shipping address, shown below. And
as described above for sending proteins, put your samples in Eppendorf tubes
in a Styrofoam box with crushed ice ONLY (no "picnic ice" or ethylene
glycol packs, which tend to freeze samples). And don't forget to send
them
FedEx PRIORITY.