Tissue Micro Array tool - Spatial Transcriptomics

This is a mold for silicone injection molding to create a tool for Tissue Micro Array (TMA). The silicone mold created can then be used to create a paraffin block with holes to act as receiver block in TMA. Donor block  can be cut with appropriate size skin biopsy punch. 

Based on Nikolaos Pazaitis and Alexandra Kaiser's paper ‘TMA-Mate: An open-source modular toolkit for constructing tissue microarrays of arbitrary layouts’ (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2023.e00419). Detail methology and more molds can be found in the original paper. The printing specifications in this paper were based on author's Ender machine with Bowden-driven extruder, which is way to slow for Bambu direct drive machines. My printing settings reflects this.

Adapt the array size to 4mm x 8 holes, which gives a tissue area of 24 x 12mm, matching the capture area of 10x Xenium spatial transcriptomics.

This is designed to maximise capture area when performing spatial transcriptomics/multiopmics on already embeded tissue. I use a 4mm biopsy punch with plunger to extract tissue from donor FFPE blocks and transfer to receiver block made with this tool.