Yale Cancer Center/Pathology Tissue Microarray Facility

Welcome to the Yale Cancer Center/Pathology Tissue Microarray Facility, a Cancer Center shared resource. We provide the university community with services related to tissue microarray technologies. Services are also available for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

These services include:

• Array design
• Slide distribution
• Technical support
• Cell line and tissue controls

Tissue microarrays are produced by a method of re-locating tissue from conventional histologic paraffin blocks such that tissue from multiple patients or blocks can be seen on the same slide. This is done by using a needle to biopsy a standard histologic sections and placing the core into an array on a recipient paraffin block. This technique, originally described by in 1987 by Wan, Fortuna and Furmanski in Journal of Immunological Methods. They published a modification of Battifora's "sausage" block technique whereby tissue cores were placed in specific spatially fixed positions in a block. The technique was popularized by Kononen and colleagues in the laboratory of Ollie Kallioneimi after a publication in Nature Medicine in 1998. This technology should not be confused with DNA microarrays where each tiny spot represents a unique cloned cDNA or oligonucleotide. In tissue microarrays, the spots are larger and contain small histologic sections from unique tissues or tumors.

The arrays are assembled by taking core needle “biopsies” from specific locations in pre-existing paraffin-embedded tissue blocks and re-embedding them in an arrayed “master” block, using techniques and an apparatus developed by Konenen et al. In this way, tissue from 600 specimens can be represented in a single paraffin block.

The arraying device is designed to produce sample circular spots that are 0.6 mm in diameter at a spacing of 0.7-0.8 mm. The surface area of each sample is 0.282 mm², or in pathologists’ terms, about the size of 2-3 high power fields. The number of spots on a single slide is variable depending on the array design, the current comfortable maximum with the 0.6 mm needle is about 600 spots per standard glass microscope slide.

Once a TMA is constructed it can be used for quantitative analysis. AQUA technology measures the actual level of protein in the cells by fluorescence. This is a much more sensitive and specific way to measure proteins for more specialized chemotherapeutic treatment.

Technical Director:
Lori Charette

Location: CB-568
Tel: 203.737.4198
Tel: 203.785.5879
Fax: 203.737.1198

Mailing:
Yale School of Medicine
Department of Pathology
PO Box 208023
New Haven, CT 06520-8023

For Shipping:
Yale School of Medicine
Department of Pathology
310 Cedar St.CB-568
New Haven, CT. 06520