4. Studies on Mechanism of Freezing Injury by Cryo-scanning Electron Microscope and Freeze-replica(Papers presented at the 35th Annual Meeting, April, 1989, Tokyo)

Abstract

It has been suggested that cellular deformation which results in direct membrane-to-membrane contact is responsible for the occurrence of slow freezing injury in tertiary hyphae of mushrooms. Present study examined the quantitative relation between deformed cell number which was observed by Cryo-scanning electron microscope and intramembrane particle aggregated cell number which was observed by freeze-replicas. The observations by both Cryo-SEM and freeze-replicas were done on same samples by using JSM-840A Cryo-system. The results showed a close quatntitative relation between the number of deformed cells and the number of IMP aggregated cells. This result provides a strong evidence that cellular deformation by slow freezing causes IMP aggregation and consequently injury takes place.