Limits of vibrating microtomy

Modern vibrating slicers allow making mouse brain slices with a reliably established thickness from 50 µm, but they have a strong limitation on the size of the sample suitable for cutting. The aim of this work was to create from scratch on a publicly available element base (from parts for a 3D printer) a so-called 3D-slicer capable of cutting any size brain into thin sections, and use it to investigate the limit-attainable values of the minimum slice thickness. Both of these goals have been successfully achieved. Both small mouse slices with a minimum thickness of 30 μm and large whole calf brain slices with a minimum thickness of 150 μm were obtained. The values obtained for slice thickness were half as large as for the thinnest slices obtained from existing commercial analogues. In addition, critical features of the effect of blade vibration frequency and sample feed rate on the minimum slice thickness were revealed, and these values are in sharp contradiction with the recently obtained data on the same subject (Li et al., 2021). In the same way, a clear correlation was established between the minimum achievable thickness and its area.