Abstract

Immunohistochemistry is a meticulous, plodding, and painstaking art. But now researchers can screen up to 200 tissue samples simultaneously, squeezing six months worth of work into two days, with Carlsbad, Calif.-based Invitrogen Corp.'s recently introduced ResGen™ VastArray™ tissue arrays. These arrays consist of up to 200 tissue cores arrayed on standard microscope slides. Applied in duplicate in a paraffin matrix, the current sets of 600-µm diameter by 4-mm thick cores are derived from 100 normal, distinct human tissues (50 from each sex) and from 24 mouse tissues derived from nine organs, including parts of the brain. The normal human tissue and normal mouse tissue arrays are suitable for analysis by immunohistochemistry (IHC) as well as in situ hybridization. Any antibody already proven effective for IHC or immunocytochemistry should function well with the VastArrays, using the appropriate blocking and incubation conditions previously developed by the researcher. The ability to test many tissue samples at once provides scientists with a new type of high-throughput protein expression screening tool, according to Matt Baker, director of antibodies for ResGen. "VastArrays enable researchers to characterize protein function, localization, abundance, and implementation in disease in a manner that will quickly produce statistically significant results,"