Useful Hard Mounting Medium with DAPI Counterstain

For many of our fluorescent immunostaining experiments, we need to have a counterstain to identify non-immunoreactive cells. We chose the Vectashield Hardmount with DAPI because the DAPI counterstain is already present in the mounting medium, which means that we don't need a tertiary incubation step with DAPI at the end of the staining experiment. The fact that the mounting medium dries also helps with preserving the sample for observation by fluorescence microscopy.