105Alfred K. Lam (ed.), Esophageal Adenocarcinoma: Methods and Protocols, Methods in Molecular Biology, vol. 1756,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7734-5_10, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2018
Chapter 10
Application of Tissue Microarray in Esophageal
Adenocarcinoma
Nassim Saremi and Alfred K. Lam
Abstract
Tissue microarray technology could allow immunohistochemical staining or in situ hybridization on hun-
dreds of different tissue samples simultaneously. It allows faster analysis and considerably reducing costs
incurred in staining. The technique also provides a high-throughput analysis of multiple tissues for the
different types of research. In the literature, many researches of esophageal adenocarcinoma use tissue
microarray to enhance the output. In this chapter, we have a brief overview of tissue microarray technolo-
gies, the advantages and disadvantages of tissue microarray, and related troubleshootings.
Keywords Tissue microarray, TMA, Esophageal adenocarcinoma, Immunostaining, In situ
hybridization1 Introduction
Tissue microarray (TMA) is one of the commonest practices used in
pathology research. In TMA, small tissue cylinders (usually diameter:
0.6 mm) are removed from many different tissue “donor” blocks and
put in an organized manner, in one empty “recipient” paraffin block,
in an array-like format. In TMA, researcher could take out a few small
diameters of the specimen with minimum damage to the “donor”
blocks [ 1 ]. Thus, the punched tissue blocks are not consumed entirely
and remain entirely useful for all morphological and molecular analy-
ses that may latterly become necessary. The most important part of
TMA devices is the two needles with different diameters. The smaller
needle, which has an outer diameter of 0.6 mm, makes a hole by
punching into empty “recipient” paraffin blocks. Afterwards, a
slightly larger needle (inner diameter: 0.6 mm) provided transfer tis-
sue cylinders from “donor” paraffin block into these pre-made holes
at specific coordinates. A standard microtome in pathology labora-
tory could be used to cut sections out of the TMA block.
TMA is most commonly used when we would like to test the
expressions of proteins by immunohistochemistry in a large number