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Thiazin red as a neuropathological tool for the rapid diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in tissue imprints

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Abstract

In recent years, we have used a variety of tau immunological markers combined with the dye thiazin red (TR), an accurate marker to differentiate the fibrillar from the nonfibrillar state of both amyloid-β and tau in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this study, we used TR as a potential diagnostic marker of AD in frozen-thawed (F-T) brain tissue and imprint cytology. Control experiments included the use of Thioflavin-S staining, fixed tissue, and some double-labeled material with TR and selected tau markers, including AT100, MC1, Alz-50, TG-3, Tau-C3, and S396. Our results indicate that TR retains its strong affinity for both tangles and plaques in unfixed F-T tissue and imprint cytology. This information provides a potential use of TR as an accurate diagnostic tool for the rapid postmortem diagnosis of AD neuropathology. This study shows the advantages of TR on cytology mainly because tools for the fast postmortem diagnosis of AD are practically nonexistent. In addition, we observed Tau-C3 immunoreactivity in extracellular tangles, suggesting that the Tau-C3 epitope is characteristically stable. Moreover, this study demonstrates that chemical fixation is not necessarily required for tau immunoreactivity on histological sections.

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Acknowledgments

Authors want to express their gratitude to Dr. P. Davies (Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, USA) for the generous gift of mAbs TG-3, Alz-50 and MC1. Dr. L. Binder is kindly acknowledged for the donation of mAb Tau-C3. also Mr. José L. Fernández for the handling of the human brain tissue, and Ms. Maricarmen De Lorenz for her secretarial assistance. This work was financially supported by CONACyT grant, No. 47630 (to R.M.). Thanks to Dr. Ellis Glazier for editing the English-language text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Physiology, Biophysics and Neurosciences, CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico D.F., Mexico

    José Luna-Muñoz & Raúl Mena

  2. Department of Cell Biology, CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico D.F., Mexico

    Janneth Peralta-Ramirez

  3. Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, General Hospital of Mexico, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico

    Laura Chávez-Macías

  4. Department of Mental Health, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Charles R. Harrington & Claude M. Wischik

Authors
  1. José Luna-Muñoz
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  2. Janneth Peralta-Ramirez
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  3. Laura Chávez-Macías
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  4. Charles R. Harrington
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  5. Claude M. Wischik
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  6. Raúl Mena
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Correspondence to Raúl Mena.

Additional information

Jose Luna-Muñoz and Janneth Peralta-Ramirez contributed equally to this work.

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Luna-Muñoz, J., Peralta-Ramirez, J., Chávez-Macías, L. et al. Thiazin red as a neuropathological tool for the rapid diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in tissue imprints. Acta Neuropathol 116, 507–515 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-008-0431-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-008-0431-x

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