Ussing Chambers

Physiologic Instruments has developed a wide selection of tissue and cell culture holders that we call "sliders" because they are used to "slider" the tissue sample into place between the two chamber halves of the EasyMount Ussing chamber. The features of these sliders depend on the characteristics of the sample. For cell culture inserts the slider is designed as a single piece that makes a water tight seal between the chamber halves as well as with the culture insert so that the cell monolayer becomes the barrier separating the fluids in each chamber half. We currently offer sliders designed for the 5 most popular culture inserts from manufacturers such as Corning-CoStar, Nunc and Millipore. Epithelial tissues, on the other hand, derive from a wide variety of sources and have a variety of size and shape constraints. For this reason we have designed specific sliders for tissues as required by our customers. The apertures on many sliders are circular in shape and range in size from 0.005 cm^2­­(e.g., drosophila intestine or newborn mouse trachea) to 1.26 cm² (e.g., bovine intestine). Other sliders have oblong apertures because some tissues, such as mouse intestine, are simply longer than they are wide. Tissue sliders come with or without pins for stretching and holding the tissue during the mounting process. They are generally a “two-piece” slider with the tissue forming the seal between the slider halves creating a tissue sandwich that then inserts between the chamber halves. For high resistance “tight” tissues such as frog skin, the sliders have a slight recess to prevent crushing the epithelial cells along the aperture perimeter in order to prevent edge damage. For tissues such as corneal epithelium or endothelium the slider is designed to handle the natural curvature of the specimen.