Histological Preparation of the Eye from Experimental Animals

Abstract

Ocular toxicity can result from topical or systemic administration of various chemicals and is evaluated histologically on a routine basis in safety assessment studies. As a result of its peculiar architecture, the eye is one of the more difficult tissues to process and artifacts are difficult to avoid with formalin-fixed specimens. We have adopted a procedure which was presented at a meeting of the Japan Association of Histotechnology which provides superior fixation and has significantly increased the quality of our routine eye sections from rodent and non-rodent species. This presentation will review our technique and variations resulting from different fixatives on hematoxylin and eosin stained eye specimens of rats.