Immunostaining with chamber slides - (Nov/24/2005 )

I use chamber slides which has 4 wells to culture my cos-7 cells and for immunostaining. Does anybody has a idea how to remove the silicone gasket of the chamber after removing the chamber from the slide? It is very difficult to remove this gasket and with it I cannot mount the coverslips.
Thanks for brigyht ideas

hey, I've been doing a bunch of that lately...looked at 4 4-chamber slides of keratinocytes just last week

I 'grab' one corner with a flat pair of forceps and pull up carefully; the gasket should come off in pretty much one piece with slow steady pressure. I have the best luck with those flat millipore forceps. I always only mangle one corner when feeding cells and doing the IF steps, to keep as much of the cells as possible on the slide; I pull the gasket up from the same corner so if I accidently pull off a couple cells, most of the well will still be fine.

does this help?

Chamber slides from Nunc/Lab-tek as well as from Falcon all come with a little black holder and white gasket remover. Use it. There should be instructions in every packet. If you don't have it ask the person who plated the cells for you.

Now there are two types....especially from Nalge Nunc.

One is fixed and you cannot rremonve the walls and this chamber slide is all white/transparent.
The other one has a blue line going thru the slides. This one is the removable kind and comes with the white or black handle like thing that can help pop up the chamber wells.

good luck

We use totally transparent ones that the chamber is removable.