Tissue microarrays for screening and quality control in immunohistochemistry: Advantage and disadvantage compared with conventional sausage blocks

Multitissue (sausage) blocks are used routinely in many diagnostic immunopathology laboratories as quality control and as a tool for screening of the new antibodies. More recently, tissue microarray has been introduced and its utility for high-throughout expression profiling of tumors is well documented. In this study, we investigated the potential utility of this technology as a tool for quality control in routine immunohistochemistry. Because the tissue microarray represent many tissue types with a wide range of antigenic expressions, we find that the tissue microarray technology has the potential to be widely used by diagnostic immunopathology laboratories for quality controls as well as for screening of the sensitivity and specificity of the newly introduced antibodies.