BSC Newsletter
Volume 1, Issue 3
Bruce J. Cochrane, President
Belated greetings from the Biological Stain Commission! Because of the distractions of traveling, I was unable to get a newsletter out at the beginning of April, but I’ll try to get caught up now.
The Board of Trustees and its Committees are continuing to work on the initiatives we have described previously. In particular, progress is being made on planning the 2025 Annual Meeting and Symposium, as well as on the website redesign project. Briefly,
Annual Meeting
The Planning Committee has been meeting regularly to nail down the logistics for the meeting, to be held on October 30-31 at Georgia State University in Atlanta. An information page has been published, and it can be accessed by clicking here or on the meeting announcement image on the BSC home page. We are still developing the list of speakers for the symposium, and it will be added to the information page in the near future. We also anticipate posting a link to meeting registration in early June. A few highlights:
- As always, we have tried to keep registration costs affordable. Thus, we have settled on a $75 fee, with a reduced fee of $25 for students.
- The BSC welcomes poster submissions from all attendees that describe recent research pertaining to stains and staining. As was the case last year, the Planning Committee will select the two strongest abstracts, one from a graduate student and one from a postdoc or resident, and the presenters will be invited to give platform talks at the symposium.
- A block of hotel rooms has been reserved at the Residence Inn by Marriott in downtown Atlanta, in easy walking distance of the meeting venue, for the nights of October 30 and 31. The meeting rate is $149 per night.
- The Meeting Planning Committee is working on the registration process with our web design team, and we anticipate that it will be available to everyone by June 1.
Web Redesign
Along with our colleagues at Mason Digital, the Web Redesign Committee is making progress on a complete overhaul of the BSC website. Design of the new homepage is complete, we are now working on navigation and all of the various content pages. There is a lot of work remaining to do, but we anticipate going live with the new site in midsummer. This is a bit later than we had hoped for, but we want to make every effort to get things right.
Laboratory
One of the major challenges of stain certification is making sure that certification requirements are up to date, and that submitted samples meet both chemical and histological standards. Recently, this issue arose with respect to Azure B. The BSC Assay Laboratory received a sample that failed to meet our standing requirement of greater than 89% dye content but performed normally with respect to tissue staining. Furthermore, when previous submissions were tested, many of them also failed to meet this chemical standard while passing all histological tests. Therefore, as of March 3rd 2025 the BSC Certification requirements have implemented a more reasonable chemical standard of 80% total dye content. Furthermore, the old standard that the sample be “mostly Azure B” has been updated to “70% Azure B” to reflect the currently used HPLC quantification methodology. For more details, see the BSC’s Assay Laboratory managers’s post about it here,
These developments are a good example of how certification standards are constantly being reviewed and updated. We owe thanks to Laboratory Manager Chad Fagan and Trustee John Kiernan for working with vendors to implement these changes.
How you can help
- Check your membership status, and consider renewing it. If you encounter glitches in doing so, please contact Chad Fagan or Bruce Cochrane. One of us will be happy to assist you.
- Consider submitting a manuscript to Biotechnique and Histochemistry. Information on doing so can be found here.
- Plan on attending the Annual Meeting next fall and presenting a poster about your latest work.