Heat stabilization is an additive-free preservation technology for tissue samples which stops degradation and changes immediately and permanently.
Due to the permanent inactivation of enzymes, heat stabilization overcomes the drawbacks of conventional tissue sample preservation techniques, such as snap-freezing followed by inhibitors.
Dramatic alterations at the molecular level occur within seconds e.g. changed metabolism, catabolic fragmentation of large molecules (such as ATP) occurs in order to release energy, leading to disrupted control mechanisms, phosphorylation states are altered and proteins begin to degrade.
As a consequence vital information may be lost or distorted, leading to inter-sample variation, risk of incorrect data interpretation and potentially misleading conclusions.
Heat stabilization can be used for almost any kind of tissue sample, and has been verified to be compatible with many downstream analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry,[4] phospho-shotgun,[5] MALDI imaging,[6] Western blot,[7] 1D and 2D gels, reversed-phased protein arrays,[8] RIA and ELISA.