Replacing DPX Mounting Medium with Natural Oil Alternatives – A Comparative in Vitro Study

Introduction: A cover slip, also known as cover glass, is a small, thin sheet of glassthat is placed over the specimen in a microscope. This is known as mounting.Mounting is the final step in histological preparation of a slide [1]. A tissue specimenmust be mounted in order to improve imaging quality during microscopy and topreserve the specimen during storage [2]. The current trend is turning organic, so wetried to discover a natural Dibutyl phthalate xylene (DPX) substitute [3]. DPX isthought to be perfect, yet it has a few disadvantages [4]. The study's objective was toevaluate and compare the effectiveness of DPX as a mounting medium withsandalwood, clove, and cedarwood oils.Aim: Compare and evaluate efficacy of naturalalternatives with dpx as mounting media.Materials and Procedure: From the archives,four paraffin-embedded blocks with a verified histological diagnosis were removed.From each block, three slices were removed and conventional H&E staining techniqueswere applied. For every group, three H&E-stained sections and three ground sectionswere collected. Subsequently, they underwent four distinct mounting media mountsand several parameter analyses [3].Result: The results were tabulated. The MannWhitney U test was employed to compare findings. Sandalwood oil demonstratedcomparable cellular architecture to D.P.X and other oils, with statistically significantfindings for various mounting mediums.Conclusion:Because of their distinctproperties, sandalwood oil functioned similarly as mounting media to D.P.X. They allhave a high refractive index; thus, with few modifications, they can be used a betternatural alternative for mounting.