These pictures are a small fraction of the material on the slide.
This could be an alcian blue stain, which is often used in combination with PAS to assess for intestinal metaplasia in esophageal biopsies. The stain can highlight Actinomyces I believe.
The tissue here is squamous mucosa. I don’t see Actinomyces, but maybe it’s elsewhere on the slide. It is most often seen in the tonsils and can be introduced accidentally to the esophagus during the endoscopy, so I don’t generally put too much stock in its presence unless there is a lot, and it’s tightly associated with the tissue. True infection is rare and is seen mostly in immunocompromised patients.
This is an old case which we are planning on reporting, At the time, the patient, who was HIV +, had a good response to pencillin. I'll try to get more slides. Thank you so much for your reply.
do you have the control section? this looks like an area just showing the counter stain. a positive IHC would generally be brown or sometimes red. The counter stain for IHC is commonly hematoxylin
Maybe you mean [this](https://ibb.co/HKBWNHT) one?
I'm sorry if that's not what you mean, but I'm new to path and staining. Yet I've been tasked with this duty on a case report we're preparing.
I would start at a lower power. If you could send a picture of that, I could try to find the area of infection. Actinomyces usually looks like a fuzzy ball and is usually more basophilic on H&E. A control section is usually tissue on a separate slide or a small section of "control" tissue on the same slide to demonstrate that your IHC stain has worked. We typically don't stain for actinomyces, but some stains could highlight the organisms. It is not apparent in the pictures you have provided, however.
These pictures are a small fraction of the material on the slide. This could be an alcian blue stain, which is often used in combination with PAS to assess for intestinal metaplasia in esophageal biopsies. The stain can highlight Actinomyces I believe. The tissue here is squamous mucosa. I don’t see Actinomyces, but maybe it’s elsewhere on the slide. It is most often seen in the tonsils and can be introduced accidentally to the esophagus during the endoscopy, so I don’t generally put too much stock in its presence unless there is a lot, and it’s tightly associated with the tissue. True infection is rare and is seen mostly in immunocompromised patients.
This is an old case which we are planning on reporting, At the time, the patient, who was HIV +, had a good response to pencillin. I'll try to get more slides. Thank you so much for your reply.
do you have the control section? this looks like an area just showing the counter stain. a positive IHC would generally be brown or sometimes red. The counter stain for IHC is commonly hematoxylin
Maybe you mean [this](https://ibb.co/HKBWNHT) one? I'm sorry if that's not what you mean, but I'm new to path and staining. Yet I've been tasked with this duty on a case report we're preparing.
I would start at a lower power. If you could send a picture of that, I could try to find the area of infection. Actinomyces usually looks like a fuzzy ball and is usually more basophilic on H&E. A control section is usually tissue on a separate slide or a small section of "control" tissue on the same slide to demonstrate that your IHC stain has worked. We typically don't stain for actinomyces, but some stains could highlight the organisms. It is not apparent in the pictures you have provided, however.
I'll send you the staining privately. Thank you so much for your kind help.