An Alternative Technology to Prepare Tissue Microarray Using Frozen Tissue Samples

In this method, an agarose-gel-based array recipient block is first made using several simple instruments. Frozen donor tissues are then manually cored and arrayed into the recipient block array at −10�C. After arraying, the array block can be immediately sectioned on a cryostat microtome to make TMA slides for in situ hybridization and immunocytochemistry studies. TMAs made by this method have well-defined array configurations, good tissue/cell morphology, and well-preserved proteins and mRNAs. This low-cost and time-saving method provides an alternative tool for preparing high quality TMAs for gene expression analyses.