McClean: Fixation of Yeast (Bisaria Protocol)

Overview

This is the protocol used by Anjali Bisaria for rapidly fixing yeast cells from chemostat cultures to image for both bud index as well as fluorescence. We found that this protocol preserves both GFP and mCherry fluorescence.

Materials

• Yeast cells
• Formaldehyde 37% (Sigma-Aldrich, #252549)

Protocol

• Prepare eppendorf tubes with 50μL of 37% formaldehyde, one per sample.
• Add 450μL of culture to 50μL of formaldehyde in an eppendorf tube and mix by inversion. (The goal is to have a final concentration of formaldehyde around 3.7%. So you can adjust the cell and formaldehyde volumes accordingly, as long as you end up with 3.7% formaldehyde).
• Incubate the tube at room temperature for 15-20 minutes.
• Spin down gently for 5 minutes at 8000rpm in the small eppendorf centrifuge.
• Resuspend cells in 75-100μL of 0.1M potassium phosphate
• Store samples at 4°C until you are ready to image.

Notes

Please feel free to post comments, questions, or improvements to this protocol. Please sign your name to your note by adding '''*~~~~''': to the beginning of your tip. *Megan N McClean 15:08, 25 July 2013 (EDT) We found empirically that removing the formaldehyde is very important for preserving GFP fluorescence. Don't incubate cells with formaldehyde for more than 20 minutes.

References

Anjali Bisaria, Senior Thesis, 2012

Contact

Megan N McClean

or instead, discuss this protocol.