Many neuropathology archives contain extremely precious material: brain and spinal cord samples of patients who died decades ago, often well before specific therapies had been established and used. Therefore, this material is unique in that the pathological changes were only driven by the disease process, but were not modified by any drugs currently used for treatment. This material is the ideal starting point for the identification of molecular pathways involved in the initiation and progression of the disease. However, for a long time, it was inaccessible to such studies since the tissue has been fixed with paraformaldehyde, embedded in paraffin, and stored for many years at room temperature. Due to these conditions, the mRNA is degraded or chemically modified, and was essentially unretrievable. Over the last years, however, novel isolation and amplification techniques became available, which make even large scale, whole genome microarray analyses from archival tissues possible.
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