Antigen Recovery for Vimentin Immunostaining by Reducing Agents for Two Cases of Spindle Cell Tumors

Three clinical cases in which imlnunostaining on formalin fixed, paraffin embedded tissue resulted in falsenegative or only rare staining for vilnentin were pretreated with various methods. For 2 of these cases, treatment with reducing agents improved the extent of immunostaining for vimentin and added only 23 min to the staining procedure. Pretreatment with microwave irradiation has been previously reported to improve immunostaining for vinientin. However for 1 of the 2 cases in which reducing agents enhanced vimentin immunostaining, pretreatment with microwave irradiation was ineffective at improving vimentin staining. This result indicates that it may be helpful to use a reducing agent in parallel with the microwave in-adiation technique when the results of immunostaining for vimentin are important for the differential diagnosis. (The J Histotechnol 21:45, 1998)