Specimen Preparation for Immunocytochemistry

Specimen preparation for immunolabeling should stabilize the tissue architecture and expose the antigen for immunolabeling. Techniques vary from simply flooding a culture well with fixative followed by rinsing and immunolabeling the specimen to sophisticated surgical techniques, complex specimen freezing, substitution, embedding, and sectioning. Naturally, any perturbation of the structure of the tissue at this stage will be apparent when defining the immunolabeling. Dislocation of tissue components will give false localization and, at worst, the specimen details will not be interpretable. Specimen preparation involves fixation, a complex chemical and physical process, to stabilize the specimen and further manipulations to prepare the specimen for immunolabeling. Fixation was described in Chapter 2; the remaining manipulations will be described here. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.