Laser capture microdissection of fluorescently labeled amyloid plaques from Alzheimer's disease brain tissue for mass spectrometric analysis.

Laser capture microdissection (LCM) is used to isolate minute amounts of tissue for subsequent proteomics analysis. An advantage of this technique is that a specific subset of cells or tissue structures can be isolated and enriched from surrounding material. Here, we describe a LCM-based method for the isolation of amyloid plaques from the Alzheimer's disease (AD) brain using fluorescence and nano liquid chromatography (nLC) mass spectrometry (MS) analysis. Using this approach, we detect ~600 proteins in ~250 AD amyloid plaques.