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Microbiology

Learn the toughest concepts covered in Microbiology with step-by-step video tutorials and practice problems by world-class tutors.

9. Microscopes

Reviewing the Types of Staining

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Reviewing the Types of Staining

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in this video, we're going to do a review of the different types of staining that we've already covered in our previous lesson videos. And so what we're gonna do is complete all of the interactive blanks throughout this table. And so notice on the far left we have the type of stain in this column. And then in this second column, what we have is the description of the stain. So first what we have are simple stains which recall includes the basic positively charged dies. And the acidic negatively charged dyes and simple stains use a single stain and they're only going to be standing the inside of cells or the background of the cells behind them. And so recall that the positively charged basic dyes are going to stay in the inside of the cells directly, whereas the negatively charged acidic dyes are going to stay in the background of cells. Next, what we have our differential stains which as their name implies, are going to be used to differentiate microorganisms by uh staining them different colors. And so what we have are two examples of differential stains that we had talked about first is the gram stain. And the gram stain is a procedure that stains gram positive and gram negative bacterial cells different colours. The gram positive cells are going to be stained a purple color. And so all of the purple bacteria that you see here are gram positive and the gram negative bacteria are going to be staying the pinkish color. And so these gram positive and gram negative bacteria are different from each other in their cell wall composition. And so the gram stain helps to differentiate these two major classes of bacteria. Now the acid fasting is also a differential stain and it is going to be used to differentiate acid fast microorganisms that are not easily stained. And that's because these acid fast microorganisms have that waxy material, my colic acid in their cell walls. And so the acid fast staining is going to stain acid fast bacteria. This purplish color as you see here then we had talked about special stains and special stains are going to be used to stay in very specific cell structures. And so we had talked about the capsule stain that can be used to stain the background so that the capsules of the cells stand out. And so once again the capsules and this image would be that white border that you see around the bacteria that would be the back the bacterial capsule that's being stained. Then we had also talked about the endospore stain, which is of course going to be a stain that is used to stain endo spores which normally do not stain. And so in this image, the endo spores are these little blue dots that you can see through out here. Then last but not least for the special stains. We had talked about the flow gela stain, which of course is going to be a special dye that coached the outside of the flow gela in order to make the flow gela more visible. And so over here we're showing you an image of the flow jealous standard. You can see all of the flow gela branching off of this particular bacterium. And then last but not least. We had talked about fluorescent dyes and tags. And so the fluorescent dyes or just dies that can be made to stay in all cells and or only specific cell structures. And then the fluorescent tags are specifically used in immuno fluorescence where antibodies can be attached to fluorescent dyes. And ultimately the antibodies can be used to stain very specific molecules and so it helps to create fluorescent as we can see here in this image. And so this year concludes our brief review of the different types of staining that we talked about in our previous lesson videos. And so I'll see you all in our next one.
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Problem

Which of the following stains is NOT correctly matched with its function or purpose?

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Problem

Which of these is considered a differential stain and why?

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