Formalin fixation and embedding in paraffin is still the best and most widely accepted method for preserving tissue samples. The reason is simple: this is a method that best preserves the tissue and cells (especially nuclear) morphology. However, in most of cases, one...

IHC on CNS tissues is obviously best done on fixed tissue, with fixation preserving proper cell morphology, and other important morphological features of tissue organization. However, I have noticed that many people have problems with the epitope recovery in fixed CNS...

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is the major cause of virus-related birth defects in newborns: between 0.5 to 2.5% of all newborns infected with CMV, 5-10% or those that are symptomatic (!) Intrauterine infection of the fetus could damage its central nervous system devel...

Sometimes the recovery of epitopes on tissue section may be non-successful due to:

-Temperature sensitivity of an epitope (heating over 100 degrees leads to irreversible denaturation of the protein without subsequent proper re-folding). This is a quite rare case, but m...

Multicolour immunofluorescence on tissue sections is very informative, when it comes to the expression of various tissue and differentiation markers. However, usually it is performed in cryostat sections: the cell and tissue morphology has to be sacrificed to preserve...

To study the expression of a marker in a series of tissues or tumours, IHC using microarrays is convenient and allows to process large number of samples at once.

This is the way the group of Olsson et al. (2011) has recently demonstrated that various CD4...