Destaining: PTA

Actually, PTA staining can (mostly) be removed after scanning. I had a student (Hannah Schmidbaur) do some studies on this, and I have done some more experiments. The short answer is to wash out the PTA with a slightly alkaline buffer, e.g. PBS with 0.01M NaOH (figure below; third row). The destaining takes about as long as the staining did (I think), and you should make sure there is enough destaining buffer (at least 10X the volume of the tissue). And of course the only way you can see if the PTA is gone is using X-ray imaging.

Hannah's presentation from the Bruker MicroCT user meeting 2015:
https://www.bruker.com/fileadmin/user_upload/8-PDF-Docs/PreclinicalImaging/microCT/2015/uCT2015-21.pdf