Hi Lauren Herron

I have used sodium citrate as antigen retrieval solution for my paraffin slides and it works absolutely fine.

Varsha

Hi,

I would recommend also the Citrate Buffer, because is the recomended.

But if you are a starting an IHC for a new antibody I would friendly suggest you to try different buffers and times, antibody dilutions, blocking solutions (with permeabilizers or not)... and other conditions.

Sometimes you find surprises never expected.

keep it up!

The choice of antigen retrieval may depend on many factors and as such it is hard to provide a clear cut answer to your question. The choice of antigen retrieval method/solution can depend on the tissue type, fixation type/duration, preparation of tissue, choice of primary antibody, etc. Most antigens can be easily retrieved with either Tris/EDTA buffer (pH9.0) or Citrate Buffer (pH 6.0), however some antigens can be particularly difficult to retrieve and require PIER (Proteolytic-Induced Epitope Retrieval) using something like proteinase K, etc. My suggestion would be to try HEIR (heat-mediated antigen retrieval) first. I would suggest running one slide with Tris/EDTA buffer (pH9.0) and one with Citrate Buffer (pH 6.0) to see which method works best the first time that you use any antibody. If neither of these work, then you can try PIER or work with your antibody concentration to try to obtain positive staining. With that said, in heart tissue, most of the time Citrate works better in human tissue but we have more success with Tris/EDTA in mouse cardiac tissue. When I worked with CNS tissue, I didn't use antigen retrieval at all, but we didn't use paraffin embedding. Hence, these things often can only be determined empirically by testing them out in small batches. This is the reason that your question cannot be answered with a simple "use this" statement.