Laser Capture Microdissection on Frozen Sections for Extraction of High-Quality Nucleic Acids

Many cancers harbor a large fraction of nonmalignant stromal cells intermixed with neoplastic tumor cells. While single-cell transcriptional profiling methods have begun to address the need to distinguish biological programs in different cell types, such methods do not enable the analysis of spatial information available through histopathological examination. Laser capture microdissection offers a means to separate cellular samples based on morphological criteria. We present here an optimized method to retrieve intact RNA from laser capture microdissected tissue samples, using pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma as an example, in order to separately profile tumor epithelial and stromal compartments. This method may also be applied to nonmalignant tissues to isolate cellular samples from any morphologically identifiable structure.