Supravital Nile Blue Sulphate Staining in the Cell Death Studies

Abstract

It is a classic observation that the non-viable or dying cells can be more or less specifically stained with vital dyes (Gräper, 1933; Stockenberg, 1937; Bieling, 1937). Neutral red (Ries, 1937), trypan blue (Williams, 1950; Weimar, 1959), lissamine green (Holmberg, 1961), methylene blue (Saunders et al., 1962; Koenig, 1965), Nile blue sulphate (Saunders et al., 1962; Center, 1970), eosin (Geczy and Baumgartner, 1970) and nigrosin (Kaltenbach et al., 1958) were used to differentiate the dead from the living cells (Wiegand, 1967). Almost everyone who has studied physiological cell death during embryonic development has used diluted solutions of Nile blue sulphate for a vital or supravital demonstration of degenerating cells (Ballard, 1965; Saunders and Fallon, 1966; Hinchliffe and Ede, 1967; Dawd, 1969; Webster and Gross, 1970; Hammar and Mottet, 1971; Heidekrüger and Merker, 1972; Wendler, 1972).