Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

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Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

Post by rjlittlefield »

I recently read about a chemical drying aid that in some cases can be a good substitute for critical point drying. Of course this led me down a rabbit hole of investigation, during which I learned quite a lot. The purpose of this posting is to document some of that, before I forget what I learned and lose the references. You know how this goes.

The chemical is hexamethyldisilazane, also known as HMDS and several other names. There's a Wikipedia article, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bis(trimethylsilyl)amine

I first encountered the chemical in a paper titled "An in-depth description of head morphology and mouthparts in larvae of the black soldier fly Hermetia illucens", Daniele Bruno et.al, Arthropod Structure & Development 58 (2020) 100969, currently available at https://www.entomofago.eu/wp-content/up ... hparts.pdf . The relevant paragraph there says:
2.4. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
For SEM analyses, all the samples were fixed with 4% glutaraldehyde in 0.1 M Na-cacodylate buffer (pH 7.4) for 1 h at room temperature. After 5 washes in Na-cacodylate buffer, they were postfixed in a solution of 1% osmium tetroxide and 1.25% potassium ferrocyanide for 1 h in the dark. After 5 washes in Na-cacodylate buffer, samples were dehydrated in an increasing series of ethanol and washed twice (8 min each) with hexamethyldisilazane, promoting the drying of tissues. Dried specimens were mounted on stubs, gold-coated with a Sputter K250 coater, and then observed with a SEM-FEG XL-30 microscope (Philips, Amsterdam, The Netherlands).
For our purposes here, the most important thing about this paragraph is what it does not mention: critical point drying.

Let me digress for a moment. The standard method for preparing highest quality SEM specimens is critical point drying, or CPD. CPD works because of an odd quirk of physics. We are all familiar with solid, liquid, vapor phases and the transitions between those: solid to liquid is melting, solid to vapor is sublimation, and liquid to vapor is evaporation. The odd quirk is that at temperatures and pressures above a "critical point", the liquid and gas phases merge into a single regime called "supercritical fluid". A supercritical fluid can have any density between liquid and vapor, and it will never separate into high- and low-density phases with a discrete boundary between them. Instead, a supercritical fluid simply expands to uniformly fill whatever space is available to it. So, by following a temperature/pressure trajectory that loops around the high side of the critical point, you can go from a high density liquid to a low density vapor without ever forming a liquid/vapor surface. With no surface, there is also no surface tension, and that's the key aspect. With critical point drying, you can go from a specimen that is totally wet and immersed in liquid, to one that is totally dry and surrounded by vapor, without ever subjecting it to the surface tension forces that would occur with normal evaporation. The result is similar to freeze drying, with the additional advantage that the specimen is not exposed to damage by crystal growth during freezing.

The one downside to critical point drying is expense. A significant piece of equipment, initially costing $10K and up, is needed to control the fluid flow and pressures involved. Even using carbon dioxide, which goes supercritical at a fairly low point, the dryer has to safely handle pressures over 1070 psi, about 73 atmospheres, in a chamber that can be opened for specimen insertion and removal.

Because of equipment cost for critical point drying, some alternative method is often desired. Freeze drying can work, but requires significant vacuum to work quickly, and the freezing process can damage specimens. For a while, a fluorocarbon tradenamed "Peldri" was used as a sublimation agent (heat to liquid, saturate subject, cool to solid, allow to sublimate), but that apparently became unavailable a couple of decades ago. The remaining alternative is some liquid that can manage to evaporate without tugging hard enough on the subject to cause problems.

Hexamethyldisilazane is one of those liquids. It does not work well for all subjects, but it has been tested favorably against CPD for a wide range of animal tissues and some plant tissues.

A freely available reference is https://phorid.net/hmds.php , (Brown, B.V. 1993. A further chemical alternative to critical-point-drying for preparing small (or large) flies. Fly Times. 11: 10). It concludes that "Specimens come out exactly like CPD-prepared specimens, ready for SEM or for general mounting for the collection." The images in the paper look great -- I would be hard pressed to tell that his specimen dried with HMDS is not fresh.

One of the seminal papers in this area seems to be https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlin ... 1070260603 (Comparison of hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS), Peldri II, and critical-point drying methods for scanning electron microscopy of biological specimens", D. F. Bray,J. Bagu,P. Koegler, First published: 15 December 1993 https://doi.org/10.1002/jemt.1070260603 ). The freely available abstract says:
Abstract
Three different drying methods, critical-point drying (CPD), Peldri II, and hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS), were compared using representative animal (rat kidney, trachea, duodenum, lung, and red blood cells) and plant (leaves from ten species of monocotyledons and dicotyledons) specimens. All three drying methods produced identical results with animal specimens. Plant specimens showed signs of shrinkage regardless of which drying method was employed. The order of preservation quality from best to worst for leaves was CPD > Peldri II > HMDS, with the CPD method providing substantially better results in all but one case. Postfixation of leaves with osmium tetroxide resulted in poorer preservation in all instances. Peldri II caused complete extraction of leaf cuticular wax, while both both CPD and HMDS showed minimal extraction compared with samples air dried directly from acetone. These results indicate that HMDS provides a time-saving and inexpensive alternative to CPD for animal specimens. Plant specimens, particularly those containing cells with large central vacuoles, are adequately preserved only with the CPD method. In addition, postfixation with osmium should be avoided when processing plant specimens for scanning electron microscopy. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
I paid for short-term access to the full paper. That mostly led me to conclude that the abstract is a great summary of the full paper.

However, there was one additional snippet that definitely caught my attention:
The mechanism of action of HMDS is not known. It is a reagent commonly used in gas chromatography for making silyl ethers of compounds with one or more reactive compounds such as sugars, amino acids, and alcohols (Nation, 1983). The combined properties of low surface tension and cross-linking potential are likely to be important factors in the suitability of HMDS as a drying agent for animal specimens.
It's also worth noting that Bray et.al. report that for their rat samples, "specimens dried directly from acetone showed severe shrinkage, which was visible to the naked eye as well as under the microscope". But in contrast, my black soldier fly larvae mouthparts came out quite nicely from just acetone, even skipping all the fixation processes described by Bruno et.al.

So, at this point it's totally unclear to me when the HMDS really is and is not required. Since I now have a bottle of the stuff, I'll probably use it often. On the other hand, at a total cost of $115.44 for 250 ml (from https://www.polysciences.com, including tax and shipping), I'm not inclined to tell other people "This stuff is magic, you gotta try it!"

Adding some visual description of what HMDS does, here is a series of three photos showing what happens when a thoroughly dry split body of Noctua pronuba is saturated with acetone alone for one half, HMDS alone for the other half, and just allowed to air dry:
Image

It's very clear that when wet, both fluids cause the long scales to collapse down tight against the body. In other words, "low surface tension" is not nearly low enough to keep the scales from moving. On the other hand, after both fluids have evaporated, the scales treated with HMDS recover much more of their original loft. I do not know why this is, but I repeated the experiment for a couple of other moth specimens, and got the same results.

So, there is something about HMDS that causes it to work nicely as a drying agent for both rat samples (fixed proteins and lipids) and for moth scales (bare chitin on the surface), but not for plant samples of the type tested by Bray et.al.

Meanwhile, on yet another hand, there are other reports that HMDS also works nicely for pollen. From https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... 9409106286
Hexamethyldisilazane as a Drying Agent for Pollen Scanning Electron Microscopy
William F. Chissoe,Edward L. Vezey &John J. Skvarla
Pages 192-198 | Published online: 12 Jul 2009
https://doi.org/10.3109/10520299409106286
Abstract
Use of hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) as a final dehydrating solution provides robust, undistorted secondary electron images of a variety of angiosperm and gymnosperm pollen grains, including those considered to be susceptible to collapse in the scanning electron microscope. Ease of handling, low cost, lack of specialized equipment, minimal expenditure of time, and high rate of success are factors that favor HMDS over other drying agents for preparing pollen grains for scanning' electron microscopy.

I wish I could be more definitive, but it seems that this is a case of "your mileage may vary!"

If anybody has other references or experiences, please share.

--Rik

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Re: Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

Post by rjlittlefield »

Adding some sources, before I lose the URL's...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-tension_values
https://lnf-wiki.eecs.umich.edu/wiki/Critical_point_drying
https://lnf-wiki.eecs.umich.edu/wiki/Tousimis_915B_Critical_Point_Dryer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_drying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension , acetone=23.70, ethanol=22.27
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-tension_values
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/je60041a014 , surface tension of HMDS about 18
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/surface-tension-d_962.html , surface tension of hexane about 18 (in compatible units)

Observation: HMDS seems totally miscible in ethanol and acetone.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3109/10520298309066811
A New Method Using Hexamethyldisilazane for Preparation of Soft Insect Tissues for Scanning Electron Microscopy
James L. Nation
Pages 347-351 | Published online: 12 Jul 2009
Abstract
A new rapid procedure for preparing soft internal tissues from insects that allows air drying was found to compare favorably with tissues prepared by critical point drying. In the new procedure, tissues were fixed in 1% glutaraldehyde, dehydrated through a graded ethanol series, immersed in hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) for 5 minutes, and air dried. Tissues prepared by both the HMDS treatment and by critical point drying were coated with gold for scanning electron microscopy. Tissues prepared by the HMDS treatment did not shrink or distort upon air drying and excellent surface detail was preserved. The HMDS treatment required about 5 minutes, whereas the critical point drying procedure required about 1.5 hours.
Edited to add, 2/3/2022: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254165 , Scanning electron microscopy preparation of the cellular actin cortex: A quantitative comparison between critical point drying and hexamethyldisilazane drying, mentions that for the studied material, washing in 100*1% steps of HMDS concentration and washing in 10*10% steps were not different from each other, but were both significantly better than 4*25% steps or 2*50% steps. The subjects were tiny: 200-nm-thick actin network just under cell membranes. "Better" meant fewer instances of >110 nm holes in the dried network.

--Rik

René
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Re: Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

Post by René »

Nice collection of links, thanks Rik. The actual number for the surface tension given for HMDS is higher than I expected. Other factors might indeed be involved in explaining the working as a drying agent. HMDS is used a lot in electronics, eg https://www.biolinscientific.com/blog/w ... ment-works where free hydrophilic -OH groupes are modified and become hydrophobic. Not sure whether this will occur at room temperature, but if it does, it might help keeping your material 'fluffy' instead of clinging together.
Criticial point drying is tedious, and if I can avoid it so much the better. At least for plankton (protists) CPD methods are tricky, with generally an enormous loss of material. I have been using HMDS since the 1990's. Nevertheless, I haven't been using it a lot, so cannot give useful comments on how it compares to CPD. I used it with green algae (Pyramimonas), cryptophytes, sperm cells and lately, a chrysophyte (Mallomonas). Latest results are shown on a German forum (https://www.mikroskopie-forum.de/index. ... ic=40177.0)

Another method used (pretty much solely) in Japan is freeze drying from t-butanol. As the melting point of t-butanol is at 25oC, putting it in a vacuum at 4oC is enough to sublimate the t-butanol from solid to gas without the problem of a surface tension at the liquid to air boundary. I've first read about it in a Jeol specimen preparation protocol, but have never seen it in use. A specific search showed a more or less recent report in Microscopy Today: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... y_Butanol . The evaporated butanol ends up, and unfortunately damages the oil in the older ordinary diffusion pumps, which might explain why this method didn't get popular.

Best wishes,
René

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Re: Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

Post by rjlittlefield »

René, thanks for the comments and links. In searching the forum, I had noticed that you were the only person mentioning HMDS, so I had hoped you would add to this thread.

The t-butanol technique is completely new to me. Quick search found what seems to be a good overview article at http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/baskin ... eToday.pdf (doi:10.1017/S1551929514000522) .

--Rik

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Re: Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

Post by jnh »

Very interesting method. How easy is HMDS to come by for the average citizen? Are you going to try this soon?

If modification of surface OH groups is indeed involved (there should be plenty on chitin), did you find any references as to how other silylation reagents (such as BSA or BSTFA) might perform?

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Re: Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

Post by rjlittlefield »

How easy is HMDS to come by for the average citizen?
I had no trouble buying mine online at https://www.polysciences.com/default/he ... azane-hmds . Item cost shows as $84 for a 250 ml bottle, but total cost was $115.44. Tax would be about $7.22, so shipping was $24.21. Apparently it's not hazardous enough to require an expensive surcharge, but it came in a big box with lots of solid foam around the bottle-in-a-bag.
Are you going to try this soon?
I used HMDS in a couple of different ways with my black soldier fly larvae mouthparts, viewtopic.php?f=27&t=44089 . The first was to kill by boiling, fix in glutaraldehyde, dehydrate in alcohol, treat in HMDS, and dry in air. That produced the result shown in the first post. It is visually interesting, but does not match the appearance of the subject in water immediately after boiling (shown later in the thread). Then I switched to just dehydrating in acetone and drying in air, no glutaraldehyde and no HMDS. That gave a final result that was very similar to fresh in water. The very best result that I got was to dehydrate in acetone, treat with HMDS, then dry in air. That was marginally better than acetone alone, and I have no evidence that the difference is more than random variation.

I am currently processing some end-of-the-year flying aphids with glutaraldehyde, then alcohol, acetone, and HMDS. (The acetone is because I have no reason to think that my denatured ethyl alcohol is free of water.) The results do not look remotely as good as Brown's phorid fly (https://phorid.net/hmds.php).
did you find any references as to how other silylation reagents (such as BSA or BSTFA) might perform
I do not recall those being mentioned. The paper by Bray et.al, linked above, does say "Other methods involve the use of low-surface-tension solvents such as Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) (Nation, 1983), tetramethylsilane (TMS) (Dey et.al., 1989), and dimethoxypropane (DMP) (Weyda, 1992)".

--Rik

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Re: Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) -- a drying aid

Post by rjlittlefield »

The previously mentioned flying aphids came out so badly that I never bothered photographing them.

But more recently, I had another occasion to try drying with HMDS, this time with some small wasps. These are the parasites on whiteflies that I have posted about HERE and HERE.

These subjects are tiny, about 0.8 mm total body length. They are so fragile that trying to dry directly from alcohol left the wings a total mess. But treating with HMDS before drying allowed the wings to dry cleanly. When removed from the HMDS bath, the wings initially sucked down against the body and/or glass substrate, but then as the last of the HMDS evaporated they sprang back to the same shape they had when suspended in liquid. A good model is that the HMDS does not prevent the wings from getting deformed by surface tension, but does prevent them from sticking to themselves so they can resume normal shape when the liquid totally disappears.

Following are stereo pairs of one wasp as freshly killed, then a different specimen as dried in ethyl alcohol and soaked in HMDS.

My impression is that the external morphology is well preserved, but the change in color of the eyes is striking.

Image

Image

When air-dried, versus dehydration in alcohol, the abdomens of the wasps shrivel up to a small dark lump, not at all lifelike.

These are 20X onto an APS-C sensor.

--Rik

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