Question: how do you use special stains to analyse tumor tissues? do you need any potentially harmful chemicals involved?

Karin Purshouse answered on 24 Jun 2022:

So yes, we use antibodies to find proteins that we are interested in on tissue (by proteins, I mean a particular marker in or on cancer cells) and then use glow-in-the-dark or colour-stained labels to those antibodies – so kind of like a chain – antibody tags the protein, glow-in-the-dark/colour-stained label tags the antibody. There are variations of this, but that’s the general principle whether you’re staining tissues but also if you’re doing the same on a smaller scale like in cells.

So we use a lot of potentially harmful chemicals in lab science work in general. For tissue staining, as for other work, we get training and work in a safe way. From the basics of wearing gloves and a lab coat, we use fume hoods if we need to, or tissue culture hoods, for example, to keep us and our samples safe, and we have to dispose of everything safely – we have loads of different types of bins in our lab! The tissues themselves that are being stained are no longer connected physically to the source, so it’s OK to use these harmful chemicals on them to do experiments. There’s also research going into swapping older chemical reagents with safer alternatives.
I think a lot of us are very aware of the environmental impact of research, and that includes any chemicals we use. The volumes are tiny in the scheme of things, and all chemicals are disposed of safely, but as with anything, I think we could always do more to reduce our footprint.