SIMPLE SQUAMOUS EPITHELIUM KIDNEY CORTEX

SIMPLE SQUAMOUS EPITHELIUM, C.S. (40X)
KIDNEY CORTEX

This very tall image shows almost the entire thickness of the kidney. Your goal is to find and learn to recognize simple squamous epithelium on a slide similar to this. The easiest place to find this tissue is the glomerular capsule (don't worry, you don't have to know what that is to find and recognize the tissue). In the top one third of the image you can see circular structures surrounded by a thin white space. The arrows point to two of these structures. The white space is the inside of the glomerular capsule, and the simple squamous epithelium forms a thin layer around the outside of the white space. 

SIMPLE SQUAMOUS EPITHELIUM, C.S. (100X)

KIDNEY CORTEX

In this image the arrow is again pointing to a glomerular capsule. (The rectangle shows which part of this image has been enlarged and shown below.) At this magnification you can't see the tissue yet, but you will get a better idea of where to look.

SIMPLE SQUAMOUS EPITHELIUM, C.S. (400X)

KIDNEY CORTEX

This image is the area that was enclosed in a rectangle in the previous image. The dark purple spots are the nuclei of cells, and the cytoplasm is stained a dark pink color. The glomerular capsule is marked with an asterisk (*). Look around the outer edge of the capsule and you will see some short, thin, dark lines. These are the nuclei of the simple squamous epithelial cells. There is a simple squamous epithelial cell nucleus just to the right of the asterisk. 

SIMPLE SQUAMOUS EPITHELIUM, C.S. (400X) THIN SECTION

KIDNEY CORTEX

The arrows in the image point to the nuclei of simple squamous epithelial cells. This image was made from a thin section of the kidney at the same magnification as the previous image (400X). It is about one-fifth to one-tenth the thickness of the slides used to make the top three images on this page.

Thin sections allow us to see more detail, but they are usually lighter because there is not as much tissue to absorb stain. Another difference between this slide and the previous three is that the glomerular capsule is much harder to see here. In thick sections tissues shrink more during processing, which leaves bigger spaces between the cells. The space in the glomerular capsules that you see in the top three images is not present in living tissue. This thin-section image is more life-like because it didn't shrink as much and there aren't such large spaces between cells. But the one advantage of the shrinkage in the thick sections is that it gives you an easy landmark for finding the simple squamous epithelial tissue. You will usually be using thick section slides in lab.