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Tissue Microarray Project
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Tissue Microarray Technology: Overview
Tissue Microarrays provide a new method for high-throughput molecular profiling of tissue specimens (Kononen et al., Nature Medicine, 4: 844-847, 1998) The technology was developed at the Cancer Genetics Branch, NHGRI, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
SUMMARY
High-throughput genome screening technologies, such as cDNA microarrays, and SAGE have made it possible to survey thousands of genes at a time from tissue and cell preparations. The translation of such information to improved diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic applications in the clinic requires extensive validation, prioritization and extension of such raw expression information. For example, hundreds or even thousands of clinical specimens are required to ascertain the significance of a new diagnostic test or therapeutic target. This is often tedious with conventional molecular pathology technologies, and availability of such tissue resources is often rate-limiting.
We have developed a novel technology, tissue microarrays ("tissue chips") for facilitating such "genome-scale" translational cancer research (Kononen et al., Nat Med. 1998;4:844-7.). This technology enables high-throughput molecular analyses of hundreds of tissue specimens or cells in a single experiment. Tissue microarrays are constructed by acquiring cylindrical biopsies from 500-1000 individual tumor tissues into a tissue microarray block, which is then sliced to over 200 sections for probing DNA, RNA or protein targets. A single immuno-staining or in situ hybridization reaction now provides information on all of the specimens on the slide, while subsequent sections can be analyzed with other probes or antibodies. Construction of multiple replicate blocks may allow up to thousands of sections to be generated from the same series of tissue specimens.
Tissue microarrays provide a means for rapid, very large scale molecular analysis of thousands of tissue specimens with thousands of probes for various DNA, RNA and protein targets. For example, we are utilizing the combination of cDNA and tissue microarray technologies to uncover genes involved in breast and prostate cancer progression. Taken together, the cDNA and tissue microarrays provide a powerful approach for the in vivo validation of gene discoveries, as well as a means to rapidly assess the clinical significance of molecular alterations in cancer and other diseases.
- Tissue Microarray Project Home Page
- Tissue Microarray Construction and Analysis
- NIH Tissue Array Research Program (TARP)
- Selected References
Comments, suggestions and problems to bioinformatics@nhgri.nih.gov
