Can you remove OCT from tissue? - (Nov/17/2009 )

I embedded a piece of tissue in OCT and snap froze the section. However, now I have decided to do a whole mount of the tissue and so I am not going to do any sectioning on it. My question is how do I remove it from the OCT? If I just let it come to room temperature can i just pick the tissue out of the liquid OCT? Will this damage my cells? And how can I remove the leftover glue from my tissue?

Thawing the tissue will damage it badly, the ice crystals formed during the freeze/thaw disrupt the cells (this is why frozen meat is not as good as fresh), thereby removing most of your target if looking at cellular structure/morphology.

Hi,
I am facing the same problem.
I want to extract protein from my OTC frozen samples (heart) for Western Blot.
Is this possible?

Please advise.

Thank you