Production of tissue microarrays, immunohistochemistry staining and digitalization within the human protein atlas

The tissue microarray (TMA) technology provides the means for high-throughput analysis of multiple tissues and cells. The technique is used within the Human Protein Atlas project for global analysis of protein expression patterns in normal human tissues, cancer and cell lines. Here we present the assembly of 1 mm cores, retrieved from microscopically selected representative tissues, into a single recipient TMA block. The number and size of cores in a TMA block can be varied from approximately forty 2 mm cores to hundreds of 0.6 mm cores. The advantage of using TMA technology is that large amount of data can rapidly be obtained using a single immunostaining protocol to avoid experimental variability. Importantly, only limited amount of scarce tissue is needed, which allows for the analysis of large patient cohorts (1 2). Approximately 250 consecutive sections (4 μm thick) can be cut from a TMA block and used for immunohistochemical staining to determine specific protein expression patterns for 250 different antibodies. In the Human Protein Atlas project, antibodies are generated towards all human proteins and used to acquire corresponding protein profiles in both normal human tissues from 144 individuals and cancer tissues from 216 different patients, representing the 20 most common forms of human cancer. Immunohistochemically stained TMA sections on glass slides are scanned to create high-resolution images from which pathologists can interpret and annotate the outcome of immunohistochemistry. Images together with corresponding pathology-based annotation data are made publically available for the research community through the Human Protein Atlas portal (www.proteinatlas.org) (Figure 1) (3 4). The Human Protein Atlas provides a map showing the distribution and relative abundance of proteins in the human body. The current version contains over 11 million images with protein expression data for 12.238 unique proteins, corresponding to more than 61% of all proteins encoded by the human genome.