Fowler Carol B, Man Yan-Gao, Zhang Shimin, O'Leary Timothy J, Mason Jeffrey T, Cunningham Robert E
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2011;724:23-35. doi: 10.1007/978-1-61779-055-3_2.
Tissue microarrays (TMAs) are produced by taking small punches from a series of paraffin-embedded (donor) tissue blocks and transferring these tissue cores into a positionally encoded array in a recipient paraffin block. Though TMAs are not used for clinical diagnosis, they have several advantages over using conventional whole histological sections for research. Tissue from multiple patients or blocks can be examined on the same slide, and only a very small amount of reagent is required to stain or label an entire array. Multiple sections (100-300) can be cut from a single array block, allowing for hundreds of analyses per microarray. These advantages allow the use of TMAs in high-throughput procedures, such as screening antibodies for diagnostics and validating prognostic markers that are impractical using conventional whole tissue sections. TMAs can be used for immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, in situ hybridization, and conventional histochemical staining. Finally, several tissue cores may be taken without -consuming the tissue block, allowing the donor block to be returned to its archive for any additional studies.
组织微阵列（TMAs）是通过从一系列石蜡包埋（供体）组织块中取出小的组织芯，并将这些组织芯转移到受体石蜡块中的位置编码阵列中制备而成。虽然TMAs不用于临床诊断，但与使用传统的全组织切片进行研究相比，它们具有几个优点。来自多个患者或组织块的组织可以在同一张载玻片上进行检查，并且仅需要非常少量的试剂来对整个阵列进行染色或标记。可以从单个阵列块中切出多个切片（100 - 300个），每个微阵列可进行数百次分析。这些优点使得TMAs可用于高通量程序，例如筛选用于诊断的抗体以及验证使用传统全组织切片不切实际的预后标志物。TMAs可用于免疫组织化学、免疫荧光、原位杂交和传统组织化学染色。最后，可以获取多个组织芯而不消耗组织块，从而使供体组织块能够返回存档以备任何其他研究使用。
