When you are looking for a low toxicity adhesive with some elasticity and good moisture resistance, choose a silicone adhesive.

The adhesive you select will depend largely on your biomedical research laboratory application. If you are building electrodes, you might use a silver-filled, conductive epoxy to connect a Ag/AgCl pellet. For instantaneous bonding when mounting a rodent brain slice, you might select an ethyl cyanoacrylate. When you are looking for a low toxicity adhesive with some elasticity and good moisture resistance, a silicone adhesive is the option of choice. When used with living tissue, an adhesive must be:

Cyanoacrylate adhesives have been on the market since 1958. Most industrial or household grade cyanoacrylate (like Super Glue) are made of shorter alkyl chain derivatives such as methyl or ethyl cyanoacrylate (WPI #7341 and #7342). They are very useful for temporarily holding tissues such as mounting specimens for microtome sectioning. A family of adhesives containing octyl cyanoacrylate, a plasticizer and stabilizer, was developed In the 1990's (one of them approved by FDA for human use). When bonding to tissue, these new adhesives are four times stronger and less toxic than butyl cyanoacrylate. Compared with the traditional suture, the new super adhesive has several advantages. Cyanoacrylates Not Suitable for Live Animals.

Sylgard is a 2-part silicone elastomer with a very low dielectric constant, which makes it ideal for patch clamping and many other lab applications, especially in electrophysiology. The twin pack is a convenient, single use sleeve containing both parts of the adhesive. We will show you how to properly mix the Sylgard Twin Pack.

Both Kwik-Sil and Kwik-Cast are silicone adhesives, but they are a little different.