The Staining of Basophilic Components

The term, basophilia, in the sense of Ehrlich and of histologists today ex-presses the tendency of certain cellular and tissue components to bind basic dye and to reject the acid one under ordinary conditions of histological staining. Differential selectivity of tissue structures for the basic dye or for the acid one (acidophilia) is classically utilized by histologists to visualize the morphology of tissue structures; but it also has been used purposively as the earliest of histo-chemical tools to elucidate or at least to characterize solid or soluble proteins according to their dye reactions. In the realm of modern bistochemistry dyes have not fulifiled the anticipations of early workers and have found only limited use in histochemical analyses. The reason for this lies not in limitations of theoretical possibilities in the use of the tool itself but rather in the lack of in-formation on the nature of the interaction. Such information is of course pre-requisite to histochemical applications of the dye-protein interaction. The sig-nificance of these reactions for possible future use lies especially in the fact that they, unlike other histochemical reactions which ‘paint ’ this or that grouping