Impact of fixations on anti-genetic determinants of CD4, CD68, and Pax8 immunohistochemistry: A comparative study of NBF, Zink formalin, and Bouin's fluid

Abstract

Fixation inhibits autolysis and is an essential step in disease. Our work examined how neutral buffer NBF (NBF), zinc formalin (ZF), and Bouin's fluid (BF) affected tissue specific CD4, CD68, and Pax8 anti-genetic determinants. Fifty-one sections were analyzed for each fixative marker. One hundred fifty-three portions were scored 0, 1, 2, and 3. The comparison between scores in the detection of CD4 epitopes reflects that BF fluid was significant compared to NBF and ZF at a level of p< 0.05, whereas NBF comes after ZF. Surprisingly, ZF has no significant scores in the context of CD4 detection. On the other hand, CD68 detection at the score one level revealed that NBF and ZF showed significant CD68 anti-genetic determinants, whereas none of the CD68 epitopes were significantly determined in BF fluid. Eventually, both NBF and BF produced an excellent determination of Pax8 epitopes in contrast to ZF. However, there is no significant difference between them. Regarding scores three comparisons in all fixatives, BF fluid showed high-quality CD4 marker expression in contrast to NBF and ZF; however, neither CD68 nor Pax8 showed any significance in this context. We conclude that NBF showed an excellent quality result in detecting all epitopes. However, BF fluid was supreme in detecting anti-genetic determinants of CD4 and Pax8 epitopes in score 3. Additionally, ZF could distinguish CD68 and Pax8 but failed to detect CD4. Conversely, no significant differences were recorded between both B and NBF.

Keywords

• fixative
• cd4
• cd68
• pax8
• ihc