Hydrophobic Solvent Treatment
Hydrophobic Solvent Treatment - Related Videos
01:12
Solvents
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2019
A solvent is a substance, most often a liquid, that can dissolve other substances. Here, the substance being dissolved is called a solute. When a solvent and a solute combine, they form a solution - a homogenous mixture of both the solvent and the solute. Water is a universal biological solvent. Its polar structure allows it to dissolve many other polar compounds. The ability of water to dissolve is governed by a balance between water molecules binding to each other and binding to the solute. A...
06:43
Rotary Evaporation to Remove Solvent
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2023
Source: Dr. Melanie Pribisko Yen and Grace Tang — California Institute of Technology Rotary evaporation is a technique most commonly used in organic chemistry to remove a solvent from a higher-boiling point compound of interest. The rotary evaporator, or "rotovap", was invented in 1950 by the chemist Lyman C. Craig. The primary use of a rotovap is to dry and purify samples for downstream applications. Its speed and ability to handle large volumes of solvent make rotary evaporation a preferred...
09:41
Schlenk Lines Transfer of Solvents
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2023
Source: Hsin-Chun Chiu and Tyler J. Morin, laboratory of Dr. Ian Tonks—University of Minnesota Twin Cities Schlenk lines and high vacuum lines are both used to exclude moisture and oxygen from reactions by running reactions under a slight overpressure of inert gas (usually N2 or Ar) or under vacuum. Vacuum transfer has been developed as a method separate solvents (other volatile reagents) from drying agents (or other nonvolatile agents) and dispense them to reaction or storage vessels while...
11:16
Hydrophobic Salt-modified Nafion for Enzyme Immobilization and Stabilization
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Cited by 23 •
2012
This article will describe the procedure for synthesizing a hydrophobically modified Nafion enzyme immobilization membrane and how to immobilize proteins and/or enzymes within the membrane and test their specific activity.
03:22
Calcium-Dependent Hydrophobic Interaction Chromatography: A Technique to Purify Calcium-Binding Proteins Based on Hydrophobic Interactions
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2025
In this video, we demonstrate the purification of calcium-binding protein from a dialyzed cell lysate through calcium-dependent hydrophobic interaction chromatography. The calcium-binding proteins expose a hydrophobic region upon binding with calcium, facilitating interaction with a hydrophobic group on resin. Later these proteins are eluted using calcium chelator EDTA that reverses the interaction.
FAQs
Dehydration removes water from fixed brain tissue before or during exposure to the nonpolar solvent environment. This changes the physical composition of the specimen and helps prepare it for lipid extraction and refractive-index matching. As a result, light scattering can decrease enough to support imaging through larger tissue volumes rather than only through thin sections.
Lipids contribute to differences in optical properties within brain tissue, which can scatter light and obscure structures located deeper in a specimen. Hydrophobic solvent treatment extracts light-scattering lipids and helps match the refractive index of the remaining components. These combined effects improve transparency, allowing distributed features such as neuronal pathways and vessels to be examined in three dimensions.
Solvent exposure does not preserve every tissue feature or label equally. The overview identifies tissue shrinkage, fluorescence loss, and limited compatibility with some molecular labels as important constraints. These effects can influence both the apparent dimensions of anatomical structures and the visibility of fluorescent signals, so transparent tissue should be interpreted with awareness of possible preparation-related changes.
The workflow uses fixed brain tissue, exposes it to nonpolar organic solvents to promote dehydration and lipid extraction, and then prepares the treated specimen for microscopy. Refractive-index matching contributes to the final optical improvement. The method therefore connects chemical processing with three-dimensional imaging, while the extent of structural and signal preservation depends on how the tissue responds to solvent exposure.
Transparent specimens can reveal anatomically distributed features across tissue volumes that are difficult to assess from isolated thin sections. In neuroscience, relevant targets include neuronal pathways and vascular networks, along with other labeled structures. This broader view can help investigators study how features are organized through the brain, provided that labeling remains detectable after solvent treatment.
Fluorescence may decline during solvent exposure, and some molecular labels may be poorly compatible with the treatment. Consequently, failure to observe a signal does not necessarily demonstrate that the corresponding structure is absent. Researchers should consider label compatibility and possible fluorescence loss when evaluating three-dimensional microscopy results, especially when comparing treated specimens with their original labeled state.