Excellent!

This sounds like a standard cork borer--the kind used to turn solid rubber
stoppers into one- or two-hole stoppers. The sets also come with a rod used
to hold the nested set of different-sized borers together that would work
for pushing out the tissue.

This could also be made from a piece of tubing and rod bought at a local
hardware store for a few cents. Drill a proper-sized hole a little ways
into a pine block placed over the end of the rod to push it through the
tissue when taking the core.

Phil

>Dr Juan Rosai of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center showed us at the
>Society for Applied Immunohistochemistry a type of home- made (I believe)
>trephine like punch approx 5-6mm in inside diameter that they used to
>create these multi-tissue blocks.  All you need is a cylindrical or tubular
>piece of metal whose edge can be sharpened, not necessarily razor sharp,
>and a thinner piece of metal (or wood or whatever) that fits inside this
>tube to push the core of paraffin embedded tissue out of the trephine. To
>obtain the core, you twist and press the trephine into the part of the
>block that you want and it removes a core.  These cores can then be
>labelled and saved and are embedded together once you have accumulated all
>of the samples that you wish to include in your multitissue block.  Keep a
>record and embed them in straight rows and you have a wonderful tool to
>evaluate new antibodies. They used 40 tissues in their tumor blocks, ten
>columns, 4 rows.
>
>Jeff Silverman Southampton NY

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