Pazaitis Nikolaos, Kaiser Alexandra
Institute of Pathology 'Georg Schmorl', Municipal Hospital Dresden, Campus Friedrichstadt, Friedrichstrasse 41, 01067 Dresden, Germany.
HardwareX. 2023 Apr 11;14:e00419. doi: 10.1016/j.ohx.2023.e00419. eCollection 2023 Jun.
Biomedical research and quality control procedures often demand a variety of microscopic analysis of numerous formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples from different individuals of both healthy and diseased regions of interest. Depending on the number of samples to be analyzed, conventional processing of each FFPE block separately can be laborious or impracticable. This effort can be drastically reduced by using tissue microarrays (TMAs). TMAs have a wide range of applications and can be considered as a high-throughput method to process up to hundreds of miniaturized tissue samples simultaneously on a single microscopy slide, in order to reduce labor, costs and sample consumption, and to increase results comparability. Several commercial and self-made solutions to fabricate TMAs with varying degrees of automation are available. However, these solutions may not be suitable for every situation, either due to high costs, high complexity, lack of precision or lack of flexibility, especially when diagnostically oriented pathology institutes or laboratories with constrained resources are considered. This article introduces the TMA-Mate, an open-source 3D printable modular toolkit for constructing high-density TMAs of arbitrary layouts, providing an affordable, lightweight, and accessible procedure to implement TMAs into existing histology processing pipelines. Step-by-step demonstrations for replicating the hardware and constructing TMAs are included.
生物医学研究和质量控制程序通常需要对来自健康和患病感兴趣区域的不同个体的大量福尔马林固定石蜡包埋（FFPE）组织样本进行各种显微镜分析。根据要分析的样本数量，分别对每个FFPE块进行传统处理可能既费力又不切实际。使用组织微阵列（TMA）可以大大减少这种工作量。TMA具有广泛的应用，可以被视为一种高通量方法，能够在单个显微镜载玻片上同时处理多达数百个小型化组织样本，以减少劳动力、成本和样本消耗，并提高结果的可比性。有几种不同自动化程度的用于制造TMA的商业和自制解决方案。然而，这些解决方案可能并不适用于每种情况，这要么是由于成本高、复杂性高、缺乏精度，要么是缺乏灵活性，特别是考虑到以诊断为导向的病理研究所或资源有限的实验室时。本文介绍了TMA-Mate，这是一种用于构建任意布局的高密度TMA的开源3D可打印模块化工具包，它提供了一种经济实惠、轻便且易于使用的程序，可将TMA纳入现有的组织学处理流程。文中还包括了复制硬件和构建TMA的分步演示。
