Question: How can I ship tissue for 3' Gene Expression profiling?
Answer: Tissue can be shipped in a few ways:
- A piece of tissue can be flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and shipped on dry ice. For instructions on how to proceed with such a sample, please see: How do you isolate nuclei from snap-frozen tissue for 3’ gene expression profiling?
- For shipping of tissue for a short duration(< 24 hours) after collection, the following reagents can be used :
- MACS Tissue Storage Solution, Miltenyi Biotech, 130-100-008 : Tissues shipped in Miltenyi Biotech's overnight in MACS Tissue Storage Solution at 4 °C have been used as input to our CG000147_Demonstrated_Protocol_Tumor_Dissociation. This protocol used mouse melanoma, colon tumor, and breast tumor tissues.
- HypoThermosol FRS media: Intact tissue pieces can be shipped at 4 °C in HypoThermosol FRS for up to 24 h, and it has been shown to have little effect on the transcriptomic profile as determined by 10x Genomics 3′ single-cell Gene Expression assay as reported in this paper by Madissoon et al., Genome Biology(2020). This paper studied fresh tissue: healthy spleen, esophagus, and lung from human subjects (post-mortem).
Note that we haven't specifically tested these solutions across a wide range of tissue types. The tissue type, disease state, treatment, and the time that passed between tissue collection and tissue storage in the above solutions could significantly impact the data quality. A pilot experiment is recommended before starting a large scale experiment.
Most publications have evaluated the long-term cryopreservation of tissue in freezing media (Wu et al, 2021) as an alternative to flash-freezing whole tissue or cryopreservation of dissociated cells. This approach may preserve cell surface proteins but has only been demonstrated on a few tissue types.
Note that we haven't specifically tested this approach. The tissue type, disease state, treatment, and the time that passed between tissue collection and tissue cryopreservation could significantly impact the data quality. A pilot experiment is recommended before starting a large-scale experiment.
Products: Single Cell Gene Expression, Single Cell Multiome ATAC+GEX