Services

Within the CEP, we offer the following scientific and technical services (partially in cooperation with the Tissue Bank):

Project consulting:

  • Study design and planning, chose of model
  • Validation of experimental models
  • Macroscopic and histological examination through veterinary and human pathologic expertise in pathology of animal models
  • ooperation projects for scientific publications and presentations 

Tissue processing

  • Paraffin embedding and preparing of tissue sections
  • Frozen sections
  • Hematoxylin-Eosin (HE) staining
  •  Special staining (upon request) 
  • Immunohistochemistry (IHC)
  • In Situ-Hybridisation
  • DNA-/RNA extraction in cooperation with the department of molecular pathology (upon request)
  • Other Molecular pathological studies in cooperation with the department of molecular pathology (upon request)
  • Laser microdissection (LMD, Leica)
  • Archiving of tissue (currently only paraffin blocks)
  • Light-sheet-fluorescence-microscopy

Autopsy services

  • Small laboratory animals
  • Other animals (only upon request and agreement)

Archiving and Digital processing

  • Digital pathology
  • Scanning and annotating of slides
  • Computer based analysis (Definiens Tissue Studio®, Leica Aperio Algorithms, QuPath)
  • Digital slide database (Aperio eSlide Manager, Leica)

Animal model tissue bank

  • Preparation of tissue microarrays (TMA) of animal models
  • Storage of normal tissue of frequently used mouse and rat models

Training

  • Courses on tissue sampling and storage
  • One-week-course on lab animal pathology as part of the PhD-program “medical life science and technology”
  • Courses on general and special necropsy techniques (rodents)
  • Theoretical seminars “Basics of animal pathology” on a regular basis
  • Constant lectures “Basics of comparative pathology for experimental animal work” within the FELASA course at the ZPF
  • Box “normal tissue and species associated diseases” for self-study (being set up at the moment, use for a fee/deposit)

Spatial Omics

o   Spatial Transcriptomics (Xenium in situ, 10x Genomics)
     - Single-cell and subcellular resolution
     - Targeted method requiring the selection of gene panels. Currently, the parallel readout of 100s
        of RNAs possible.

o   Multiplexed antibody staining (CODEX/Phenocycler, Akoya Biosciences)
      - Parallel readout of 10s to 100s of antibody stainings

o   Both methods work with sections from FFPE and fresh-frozen tissue samples.