Mounting Media and Antifade Reagents

Abstract

In the biomedical sciences, samples are mounted in a wide variety of media for examination by microscope. There are a wide variety of mounting media available with a correspondingly wide range of properties. Using the incorrect mounting medium may cause signal loss and optical aberrations; the correct mounting medium avoids such aberrations and preserves fluorescence signal with “anti-fading” properties. This article introduces mounting media for fluorescence microscopy, providing descriptions of their constituents and their properties, as well as accounts of users' experienceMore detailed reviews of antifade reagents have been published by Ono et al. and Longin et al.. Papers describing the effect of refractive index (RI) mismatch have been published by Diaspro et al. and Hell et al..