Assessing fibrinogen extravasation into Alzheimer's disease brain using high-content screening of brain tissue microarrays.

Background: Tissue microarrays are commonly used to evaluate disease pathology however methods to automate and quantify pathological changes are limited.

New Method: This article demonstrates the utility of the VSlide scanner (MetaSystems) for automated image acquisition from immunolabelled tissue microarray slides, and subsequent automated image analysis with MetaXpress (Molecular Devices) software to obtain objective, efficient and reproducible data from immunolabelled tissue microarray sections.

Results: Significant increases in fibrinogen immunolabelling were observed in 29 Alzheimer's disease cases compared to 28 control cases analysed from a single tissue microarray slide.

Spatiotemporal changes in Cx30 and Cx43 expression during neuronal differentiation of P19 EC and NT2/D1 cells.

While connexins (Cxs) are thought to be involved in differentiation, their expression and role has yet to be fully elucidated. We investigated the temporal expression of Cx30, Cx36 and Cx43 in two in vitro models of neuronal differentiation: human NT2/D1 and murine P19 cells, and the spatial localisation of Cx30 and Cx43 in these models. A temporal Cx43 downregulation was confirmed in both cell lines during RA-induced neuronal differentiation using RT-PCR ( < 0.