Thanks Beverly!

And thank you Joyce, my next job now will be to try Blades

...I have been advised by my supervisor to find pre-fixed blood and noone at my University knows about where to get it. I was simply trying to find a supplier. Please give my positive feedback rather than being sarcastic. I do worry about my PhD and my own ability and how up to date the techniques i use are. I do worry about the advice i recieve from my supervisor. I am in a very small research group without specific expertise in cell biology or immunology. I am doing the best i can with limited help. If you know about this protocol (which I obbviosy don't know about) then please help me?

Okay keehaa, could you give me a reference for a blood fixing protocol? The one I have involves 2 overnight incubations (one in BSA and one in fixative). I also need to prepare large volumes of the stuff. That is all that i meant by it being time consuming. Clearly it would be quicker and easier to order the blood in already fixed. The point of my experiment in not to fix blood but to detect lectin activity....

I'm in the UK and don't mind what species the blood comes from. Up to now I've been using rabbit blood...

Thank you. I've just tried it and it looks promising... They have a range of forums on biology-online to cover some of the different topics of biology. It isn't PhD student specific and I was hoping to find a forum that academics might use... but I'll wait and see what answers I get before I pass more judgement than that. Thanks.

Your supervisor sounds super nice. If he or she beleives you can do it maybe you should take that as a sign? Good luck.

I'm quite aware that the questions I ask are often quite specific to my subject (within biology). I know i can email specific people for answers to specific questions but I'm also interested in joining in on general discussions (and perhaps being able to answer some questions to help others too?!).

Does anyone know how to find out which other forums exist? It would be useful to hear people chatting about my topic as I come from a small reseach group and get only VERY limited oppertunity to have a two-way conversation about my work or the subject. I know a lot of the phD is about knowledge transfer and although reading is great talking is still better in many ways and I'm simply not surrounded by knowledge.

If I talk to someone about the topic or hear other peoples discussing it I feel much more motivated and excited about my project again (yes I am losing steam a bit). And it helps me direct reading as I tend to go and find out more about the things I've heard mentioned.

I need to know where I can buy some pre-fixed blood.

I have tried buying normal blood and fixing it myself but its a long and complicated protocol and gave me no clear resaults. Do

es anyone know where you can buy it already fixed and ready for use?

Does anyone else use hemagglutination experiments to detect lectin activity? What does agglutination of red blood cells actually look like down a microscope. My samples lyse live blood cells so i have had to fix the blood (with glutaraldehyde). But once the bloods fixed its really hard to tell whether its pelleted or formed a veil. So I've been trying to look at it on an inverted microscope to be able to tell....