Durcupan is a water-soluble

epoxy Epoxy is the family of basic components or Curing (chemistry), cured end products of epoxy Resin, resins. Epoxy resins, also known as polyepoxides, are a class of reactive prepolymers and polymers which contain epoxide groups. The epoxide fun ...

resin produced by the Fluka subsidiary of

Sigma-Aldrich Sigma-Aldrich (formally MilliporeSigma) is an American chemical, life science, and biotechnology company owned by the multinational chemical conglomerate Merck Group. Sigma-Aldrich was created in 1975 by the merger of Sigma Chemical Company and ...

. It is commonly used for

embedding In mathematics, an embedding (or imbedding) is one instance of some mathematical structure contained within another instance, such as a group (mathematics), group that is a subgroup. When some object X is said to be embedded in another object Y ...

electron microscope An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. It uses electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing it ...

samples in plastic so they may be sectioned (sliced thin) with a

microtome A microtome (from the Greek ''mikros'', meaning "small", and ''temnein'', meaning "to cut") is a cutting tool used to produce extremely thin slices of material known as ''sections'', with the process being termed microsectioning. Important in sc ...

and then imaged. Durcupan is notable for

refractive index In optics, the refractive index (or refraction index) of an optical medium is the ratio of the apparent speed of light in the air or vacuum to the speed in the medium. The refractive index determines how much the path of light is bent, or refrac ...

n_D²⁰ of 1.654, which is a very high value for epoxy resins.

References

{{reflist, refs= {{cite book , title=Polymer embedding for ultrathin slicing and optical nanoscopy of thick fluorescent samples. Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultäten der Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen , author=Punge, A. , date=2009 , url=https://d-nb.info/1000019918/34#page=44 , pages=34-35 , archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20170622085643/https://d-nb.info/1000019918/34 , archivedate=2017-06-22 , url-status=live Electron microscopy Synthetic resins