Question: why does staining the bits you cut up help you be able to get a diagnosis of the diease

Adelle Thrower answered on 12 Mar 2014:

We have to stain the tissue as when it’s only one cell thick it’s practically see through. We use a standard stain called hematoxylin and eosin stain. The hematoxylin stains the nucleus of a cell purple and the eosin stains the rest of the cell. It firstly looks very pretty but also makes the tissue visible under the microscope. Once we can see the cells we can see if they look abnormal- this is what we have to learn at university and during our lab training. It’s important to know what normal cells look like so we know when something looks wrong.