What was the name of the technique used where small cores of tissue from many different paraffin-embedded tumor blocks are arranged into a single new block, allowing high-throughput IHC analysis of hundreds of samples simultaneously on one slide?

• A. A tissue barcode microarray
• B. A global section microarray
• C. A parallel-omics slide
• D. A tissue microarray (TMA)

Answer: (D)

The main idea is a method that lets you place small tissue samples from many paraffin-embedded tumors into one new block, so you can cut one section and test all samples at once. This is tissue microarray. It involves removing small cylindrical tissue samples from donor blocks and arranging them in an array on a single recipient paraffin block. A single slide section from that block contains many discrete tissue spots, all processed and stained under identical conditions, enabling high-throughput immunohistochemistry or other parallel analyses across hundreds of samples. This efficiency is why it’s favored in studies comparing expression patterns across large tumor cohorts. Other terms aren’t standard descriptors of this technique, so the correct label is tissue microarray.