Klin Onkol 2007; 20(5): 323-329.
Laser capture microdissection (LCM) is a rapid, reliable method to obtain pure populations of targeted cells from specific microscopic regions of tissue sections for subsequent analysis. LCM is based on the adherence of visually selected cells to a thermoplastic membrane, which overlies the dehydrated tissue section and is focally melted by triggering of a low energy infrared laser pulse. Tissue sections are mounted on standard glass slides, and transparent thermoplastic membrane is then placed over the dry section. The laser provides enough energy to transiently melt this thermoplastic film in to the target cells. Several systems are available for LCM, and vary in cell-capture method, system configuration and applications. LCM was applied to a wide range of cell and tissue preparations including frozen samples, formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues or cytology smears. Depending on the starting material, DNA,
good quality mRNA, and proteins can by extracted successfully from captured tissue fragments, down to the single cell level. In combination with another techniques like expression library construction and cDNA array hybridisation, LCM will allow the establishment of new diagnostic and prognostic markers, in order to indicate therapy individually tailored to the molecular profile of a given tumour. In this paper we refer our experiences with the LCM isolation of single cells from cytology smears of lung carcinomas, frozen and paraffin embedded tumour tissues as well as cell line cytospin preparation. Our ultimate goal was to introduce LCM technology in combination with DNA/RNA isolation and linear amplification for subsequent genomic analyses such as comparative genomic hybridisation, RNA expression studies and specific amplifications of investigated genes from tissue specimens with minority of tumour cells and/or for tumour heterogeneity studies based on one the single cell level.
