you can grow the culture you get from them continuously if you enjoy keeping algae pets. note that diatom are really hard to see, and you do want very high magnification.
These days I don't really use slides- I found that glass-bottom petri dishes work well, but that's at least partly because I do inverted imaging (objective pointing up, through the sample, towards the illumination) with a custom-built XY stage microscope.
you can grow the culture you get from them continuously if you enjoy keeping algae pets. note that diatom are really hard to see, and you do want very high magnification.
These days I don't really use slides- I found that glass-bottom petri dishes work well, but that's at least partly because I do inverted imaging (objective pointing up, through the sample, towards the illumination) with a custom-built XY stage microscope.