Morphology of rat exocrine pancreas prepared by anhydrous cryo-procedures

This paper describes and compares the morphology of a relatively complex tissue, the exocrine pancreas, prepared by state-of-the-art anhydrous cryoprocedures. Cryopreparative procedures are being used increasingly for a wide range of applications, for example, electron-probe x-ray microanalysis and immunocytochemical localization of antigenic molecules, because they preserve the composition of the specimen better than procedures involving aqueous media. Some doubts have remained concerning the morphology of cryosections and the precise identification of subcellular structures. We show that thin and sufficiently large cryosections of fresh biological tissues can be produced using commercially available hardware. The freeze-dried cryosections display high intrinsic contrast, are stable under the beam, and allow identification of intracellular fine structure.