Welcome to finding out about the Compresstome®! Our Compresstome® tissue slicer is a vibrating microtome that uses a high-frequency oscillating cutting blade to help you slice through tissue to get sections for research and clinical use. The Compresstome®’s unique feature is that you embed your tissue sample into a stainless steel tube (called a “specimen tube“) and surround it with agarose. The agarose provides 360-degree stability around your tissue during the entire cutting process, allowing you to achieve higher quality slices.
There are many different types of tissue slicers on the market, but they don’t operate the way that the Compresstome® does. Other market vibratomes will have a flat stage where you glue your tissue sample, with a cutting blade that approaches horizontally. However, the blade can easily push your tissue sample and squish, tilt, and compress it—all of these effects may damage cells and tissue architecture.
Embedding tissue in agarose is simple and proven to keep the tissue from harm. The agarose helps stabilize the tissue during cutting with the Compresstome®. This yields slices with smooth surfaces, and does not harm or disrupt the tissue. Agarose embedding allows you to cut consistent, even tissue slices without chatter marks.
Watch this short 3 minute video explaining how the Compresstome® vibrating microtome works from start to finish! It’s so easy to use.
The Compresstome® vibrating microtome has been scientifically demonstrated to create more consistent tissue sections for immunohistochemistry and electrophysiology compared to other vibratomes. 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.
Compresstome® slicer models marked with “-0Z” mean that the model has our patented Auto Zero-Z® technology. These vibrating heads are precisely aligned to eliminate vibrations in the Z-axis. Auto Zero-Z® technology helps reduce damage to surface cells on live tissue samples, and further reduce chattermarks on thin sections for improved imaging results.
The entire process takes under 5 minutes! In short, here are the steps:
Here is a visual step-by-step guide for how this works:
Our specimen tubes are made of stainless steel, which a “white plunger” to which you can glue your tissue sample. Specimen tubes come in several sizes:
Did you know that you can use the Compresstome® to section both live/acute and fixed tissue? To prevent lived/fixed tissue contamination, you only need a specimen tube kit, which contains a buffer tray, specimen tubes, blade holder, and chilling block. All other components of the Compresstome® can remain the same without contamination in switching between fixed and live tissue cutting.
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