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The UCLA Tissue Array Core Facility is located in the Reed Neurological Research Center immediately connected to the UCLA Center for the Health Sciences. It is housed within an 800 sq ft. laboratory with adjacent office space for fellows, pathologists, bioinformaticians, technical staff, visitors, and the laboratory director.

Tissue sources typically derive from the abundant archived formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded human tissue sample collection contained within the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at UCLA. As a large regional tertiary care and teaching center with surgical pathology case accessions averaging over 30,000 per year, extensive stores of tissues encompassing all organ systems are available.

We utilize three manual tissue arrayers (Beecher Instruments, MD) for constructing the tissue array blocks (each supplemented with a multiblock arraying attachment) aided by bifurcated fiberoptic lighting sources (Prior Scientific). The core is equipped with five Olympus BX-series brightfield and one Leica DMLS microscope. Three digital CCD cameras (Pixera Pro 150ES, Olympus DP-10 and Olympus DP12) are scope-mounted. The Tissue Array Core Facility is equipped with conventional histology equipment sectioning and standard H&E staining. This equipment includes a Leica RM2135 Microtome.

The core is equipped with Pentium 4 computers linked to a T1 network backbone. Network server space is available for data-rich projects, and is backed up daily.

The core facility developed and utilizes its own database system, the “TMAtrix”, for all data collection purposes. It is an Oracle Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) served through Java-programmed web pages. TMAtrix is a multidisciplinary data and image repository built to support tissue array projects. Pathology, clinical, and protein expression data, as well as administrative tools, are included in the data model.