Question

If you observe live organisms under the microscope (for instance a drop of pond water in a wet mount) the organism will be relatively transparent and move around. What do you have to do to prevent motility and transparency of the microorganism?

Answer 1

In this case, you need to do two previous steps: Staining and fixation. Since the organism that you want to observe is transparent, you need to use a special dye depending on the microorganism in order to observe it under the microscope. However, before this step, we must fix the sample to the slice. For this, a common reagent called paraformaldehyde can be added to the sample. Another way is to fix these microorganism using heat Bunsen burner just as we can do with bacterial cells.