Siliceous and Delicious

Searched a little more for recipes online for the other fluorescent stains I got from Jacques. Ruthenium red allegedly dissolves in DI water. I made preparations of four different stains:

1. Fluorescein in methanol (this, as I have previously found out, doesn’t dissolve particularly well).
2. Fluorescein sodium salt in DI water (this dissolves much, much better—it makes a thick, deep red solution).
3. Ruthenium red in DI water (a few grains turn the water deep purple, but the grains don’t dissolve fully, even with several minutes of vortexing, leaving some small granules in the solution and thus presumably to problems further down the line).
4. Calcofluor in DI water with some KOH (mixed about 30-70, 1 pellet dissolved in about 100 ml of water, giving a solution with pH ~12). Makes a pale yellow solution, though there seem to be undissolved specks in it (hard to tell).

For each dye, prepared two samples of the coarse fraction of ODP/Zoe 27#, put one sample of each on the hotplate at 60˚ for two hours, and then filtered the samples down and washed the filters into small vials with DI water (the same procedure as before). Unfortunately ran out of time at this point and had to leave the samples in the vial with the DI water. This makes me somewhat nervous as most of these dyes are water-soluble so will presumably come right off the diatoms again. Maybe if I quickly prepare slides from them..? Yeah. Did it. And it feels good to at least have tried something today. We’ll see tomorrow how it works out.