Reticular fiber (Reticular fiber) is a kind of fiber within the reticular connective tissue, produced by the reticular cells, the diameter of more than 0.2 ~ 1.0 μm, toughness and no elasticity, the reticular fiber staining methods, but the staining principle is basically the same, most of the use of ammonia-silver immersion method. Modified Gomori reticulated fiber staining principle is to use the ammonia silver solution is easy to be adsorbed by the tissue and the tissue of the protein binding, by formaldehyde reduction into black or brownish black metallic silver, deposited in the tissue and its surface; the traditional method of reduction of the first use of gold chloride to tone the color, and then use sodium thiosulfate solution to wash away the tissue of the silver salts on the unreduced, the modified method omit the step, so that the reticulated fibers contrast more clearly.

Reticular fiber staining solution (modified Gomori silver ammonia method) mainly after oxidation, bleaching, mordant dyeing, silver immersion, reduction steps, and modified Gordon-Sweets method is different in that the latter adopts acidic oxidizing agent and nucleus-fixed red re-staining solution, frozen sections, cryosections and fire cotton wool sections can be used for reticulofiber staining, a variety of fixative can be used, the heavy metals, mercury salts or osmium salts, occasionally fixative. It will produce some non-specific silver background, which is often used to identify the nature and source of the tumor, carcinoma and sarcoma, lymphosarcoma and reticulocyte sarcoma, hemangioendothelioma and vascular exothelial tumor, Ewing's tumor of bone and reticulocyte sarcoma of bone, meningioma and astrocytoma, malignant nerve sheath tumors and early infiltrating carcinoma.