Advantages of the Compresstome®

  • Great morphology:  Tissue stabilization preserves tissue structural integrity.
  • Smooth sections:  tissue stabilization = No artifacts 
  • Fast: Tissue stabilization with compression allow much faster sectioning
  • Easy to maintain:  Auto-Zero-Z means Zero-Z with no calibration needed.
  • Easy to learn:  Many labs get great smooth slices on first or second try with the Compresstome.

Problems with traditional vibrating microtomes

  • Morphology changes:  Tissue tearing, folding, and shredding can cause structural distortions on tissues.
  • Slice thickness variability: Inconsistent thickness can affect protein visualization.
  • Cutting artifacts: Obvious cutting artifacts impacting protein staining.  
  • Maintenance and calibration: Need time consuming maintenance requiring specialized knowledge or could lead to degrading performance.
  • Steep learning curve: Requires A LOT of practice to perfect, particularly for users who are new to IHC and tissue preparation.

Compresstome® Vibrating Microtome

The quality of your experiments will depend on the quality of your tissue slices. The Compresstome® vibrating microtome has been scientifically demonstrated to create more consistent and reliable thin tissue sections for immunohistochemistry compared to other vibratomes. How does the Compresstome® do this? Our vibrating microtome produces tissue slices of consistent thicknesses without chattermarks by:

  • Stabilizing the brain tissue during the cutting process through 360-degree agarose embedding
  • Allowing for faster slicing, which helps save time for serial sectioning
  • Utilizing a high-frequency vibrating mechanism to reduce or eliminate chattermarks
  • Reducing chattermarks by eliminating the Z-axis deflection of the cutting blade using our patented Auto Zero-Z® technology

 

Comparison Compresstome
Comparison of tissue slices sectioned with a Compresstome® vibrating microtome vs. another leading market vibratome

 

Here, you can see the significant reduction in chattermarks in tissues slices produced with our Compresstome® tissue slicer versus sections (A, C). Slices made at the same cutting speed and oscillation on another market vibratome produces chattermarks on the surface of tissue slices.

Recommended Model/s

Not sure which model is right for your needs?

Real lab examples

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“3D” use of animal tissues in experimental design

Have you wondered how one mouse brain may be used for multiple experiments? Come discover the strategy behind using animal tissues for multi-use research experiments, so that your tissue samples can go further. Dr. Yiying Zhang from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital is our guest webinar speaker. For this Precisionary webinar, Dr. Zhang will discuss a “3D” use of animal tissues in planning experimental designs in academic research.

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Using the Compresstome® in Immunotherapy Research

Dr Astero Klampatsa (PhD) is a Team Leader in Cancer Immunotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK and a Senior Lecturer in King’s College London, UK. She focuses on developing novel CAR T cell therapies for mesothelioma and lung cancer, as well as the immunobiology of these malignancies for identification of markers of response to immunotherapy. In this webinar, Dr. Klampatsa will discuss how the Compresstome® was used to create precision-cut tumor slices (PCTS) as an ex vivo model for immunotherapy research.

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Making Precision-Cut Tissue Slices for Ex Vivo Assay Services

Visikol is a contract research services company focused on leveraging advanced imaging, 3D cell culture assays and digital pathology to accelerate the drug discovery and development process. In this webinar, Visikol explains the need for in vitro liver models to study livery injury. They demonstrate the standard assay format for creating precision-cut liver slices (PCLS), and explain how the Compresstome® VF-310-0Z vibrating microtome helps create uniform tissue slices that can be meaningfully compared between treatments. Visikol goes through how to use the Compresstome® step-by-step for making PCLS.

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Lipophilic dye, in situ Hybridization, Immunohistochemistry, and Histology

Explore how scientists use the Compresstome® vibrating microtome to create tissue slices that combine lipophilic dye tracing, whole mount in situ hybridizationimmunohistochemistry, and histology to extract the maximal possible amount of data.

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In Situ MHC-tetramer Staining & Quantitative Analysis of Antigen-specific CD8 T Cells in Tissues

Fresh tissue can vary wildly in its level of difficulty to cut, due to a variety of factors like tissue type, and maturity of the animal (myelination). Often with other vibrating microtomes, they struggle to handle highly myelinated tissue or very soft neonatal tissue. The compression effect, along with multiple points of adjustment (speed, oscillation, and agarose concentration) enables our instrument to better handle “difficult” to cut tissue. The Compresstome® isn’t just able to cut thinner than the competition, we believe that the evidence shows that we also provide higher quality cuts that preserve cell surface structures and help increase the number of healthy to dead cells. Researchers at University of Minnesota use a Compresstome® to section live tissue in their procedure to locate, quantify, and phenotype antigen-specific CD8 T cells.

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Slicing up the tumor: Lessons from attempted lung tumor slice cultures

Dr. Tsilingiri is working on tumor immunotherapy and using the Compresstome vibrating microtome to examine the interaction between tumor tissues and autologous lymph node cells in slice cultures. This work is being carried out in the frame of an EU-funded Consortium, Tumour-LNoC (Tumour-Lymph node on a chip), with the ultimate goal of mimicking the metastatic process on a chip and monitor metastasizing cells in real time.

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From two-dimensional to three-dimensional histopathology using a Compresstome®

Dr. Wong shares how he built a custom-made Compresstome® for high-speed histological 3D imaging of whole organs like brains.

References

Hintiryan H, Foster NN, Bowman I, Bay M, Song MY, Gou L, Yamashita S,Bienkowski MS, Zingg B, Zhu M, Yang XW, Shih JC, Toga AW, Dong HW. The mouse cortico-striatal projectome. Nat Neurosci. 2016 Aug;19(8):1100-14. PMID: 27322419. Download PDF

Mylvaganam GH, Rios D, Abdelaal HM, Iyer S, Tharp G, Mavinger M, Hicks S, Chahroudi A, Ahmed R, Bosinger SE, Williams IR, Skinner PJ, Velu V, Amara RR. Dynamics of SIV-specific CXCR5+ CD8 T cells during chronic SIV infection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Feb 21;114(8):1976-1981. PMID: 28159893; PMCID: PMC5338410. Download PDF

Wickersham IR, Sullivan HA, Seung HS. Axonal and subcellular labelling using modified rabies viral vectors. Nat Commun. 2013;4:2332. PMID: 23945836. Download PDF

Zingg B, Hintiryan H, Gou L, Song MY, Bay M, Bienkowski MS, Foster NN, Yamashita S, Bowman I, Toga AW, Dong HW. Neural networks of the mouse neocortex. Cell. 2014 Feb 27;156(5):1096-111. PMID: 24581503; PMCID: PMC4169118. Download PDF

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