Help with viewing stomata method

[luke_j]

Hi,

I'm familiar with the common method used to view stomata which involves nail varnish (a google search will yield the method i'm addressing if you're unfamilair). But i'm wondering, why is this method used? Why can't someone simply view stomata directly using a microscope? What's the advantage of using the nail varnish method?

Thanks for any help

[mith]

The only reason I can think of is perhaps the stomata is not rigid or will be destroyed easily when placed on a microscope. Whereas the lacquer is stronger.

[DevGrp]

To view something under a high magnification microscope you need to be able to shine light through it. I expect that if you put a leaf in a microscope you wouldn't be able to see anything. Nail varnish (the clear type) is tranparent so the light will pass straight through.

The alternative would be to freeze it / enbed it in wax and then cut very thin sections of it. This is expensive / time consuming and it would be difficlut to get just the leaf surface.

[MrMistery]

It is not neccessarly to use nail pollish. I made a prep today(strange coincidence) ago and it looks great and i didn't use nail pollish. Here it is how i did it.
I made a section in a leaf(if you need help with that, no pb)
Put it into something called floroglucine and then HCL that made it pink
put it onto the microscope
It looks like this

The little white spaces between the cells are the stomata, you do not see them as you should because my microscope is not so high-take. That is the maximum zoom. It was all I could affort