The WHOLE Brain

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The decision to cut the brain as one single block was taken on account of the fact that gross dissection of the sample into smaller blocks or thick slabs to be processed separately amounts to the inevitable loss of (considerable) tissue.

This is due to the difficulty in orienting small samples during embedding and/or the difficulty (the impossibility) of cutting perfectly parallel slabs from the fresh or fixed specimen. In addition, tissue sections are lost each time a specimen is fixed on the microtome stage and “planed” for cutting. Cutting the whole brain in one continuous session is the prerequisite for archiving all the tissue in the form of histological slices. The brain specimen will be sectioned along the CORONAL plane.