Tissue microarray reviewed and upgraded!

Simport® already stands out in this field with its wide variety of histology cassettes. In addition, Simport® offers T-Sue^TM Microarray mold kits for the diagnostic analysis of multiple tissues in paraffin blocks. Someone might say, Wow, this is amazing! What more could I expect than what I am getting from my new Tesla?

To answer this question, I propose you accompany me in this example of a diagnostic laboratory to discover the steps that you could save using our new technique. The lab technician, let's call him Carl, wants to know if the biomarker BRCA1, a protein characteristic of breast cancer, is present in his biopsies. First, Carl decides to prepare multiple-well blocks for his microarray. He takes a Simport® T-Sue^TM Microarray Mold and prepares to fill it with paraffin. Suddenly, his colleague Lise interrupts him: «Hey Carl, instead try using the coating medium at optimal cutting temperature (OCT).» Surprised, Carl says, «Why would I change the coating medium?» Lise says, «Well, because, with OCT, it gives you an opportunity to work with unfixed tissue, without the crosslinking of paraffin, keeping antigens unmasked for immunohistochemistry (IHC) or fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) on all your biopsies at once.» And that’s where we find the new options for your car!

Carl is now excited to try his new OCT block for microarray. Let’s see how he does it. Carl is very meticulous. While pouring the OCT in the T-Sue^TM Microarray Mold, he makes sure to avoid any bubbles, because they would mess with the wells he wants to create (1).  Indeed, once his mold is full and frozen at -20˚C, the OCT becomes a wonderful block (2) with the number of wells corresponding with the mold’s number of cores (3).

Having access to multiple frozen breast cancer tissue perfectly preserved in CryoSettes^TM (4), Carl put some of them on a KoolPlate^TM to slow the thaw. Then he takes a T-Sue^TM punch needle to make a 1cm punch in the first cancer tissue and places it delicately in the first well. Unfortunately, Carl sees that his biopsy sample is a little too high for the well so he decides to cut it with a razor blade to make sure the sample won't contaminate the other samples. Then, he can do it again with the same tissue if he wants replicates (5) or punches another tissue and fills the wells until the block is full.

Carl does not stop there. Feeling his samples are loose in the wells, he decides to put a room-temperature metal lid on top of the block to make it melt a little so that OCT could fill the remaining space in the well (6). It takes him around 15 seconds. Even though his move was genius, he still finds his samples loose, so he decides to add a little bit of OCT, you know, just to make sure. Satisfied now, he freezes the block filled with samples with a new metal lid on top to make sure the surface stays smooth. When everything is frozen, he removes the lid and cuts his block into very thin layers (7) that he fixes on slides for the microscope. Proud of his work, he can now do IHC to determine the presence of BRCA1 in his samples.

I have to confess Carl is so satisfied with these products, he recommends them to everyone! Would you try them? Visit our entire histology collection here: https://www.simport.com/en/4-histology