Tissue Microarray & Archiving (TMA)

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

Preservation and storage after sectioning can be an issue unless special measures are taken. The production of large batches of microarray sections is most efficient, but it raises a separate problem of antigenic loss due, presumably, to tissue oxidation. While this may not be the case if you use ZN-Formalin, regular buffered formalin is more commonly used and does not prevent oxidation after sectioning.

We, and others, have found loss of antigenicity if sections are stored for as little as a week prior to immunostaining. Work is underway to quantify this loss. It appears that loss is an oxidative process since the loss appears to be insensitive to storage temperature or retrieval conditions. For tissue microarrays, we have found that this loss can be prevented by sectioning without water (using the tape transfer system), removal of the degreasing agent after tape release by a short incubation in xylene, and finally re-coating the slides in paraffin prior to storage and storage in a nitrogen safe.