© American Society for Clinical Pathology AJCP / Editorial Immunohistochemical Protocols Back

In this issue of the Journal, Shi et al1 shatter yet another myth of tissue preparation for immunohistochemical studies, and, in doing so, they send us back to the future with antibody protocol development for immunohistochemistry in general. The authors examined 26 antibodies with the avidin-biotin method and found that more than half of the tested antibodies showed immunohistochemical staining results that were indistinguishable between fresh acetone-fixed and neu-tral buffered formalin (NBF)-fixed tissue sections. An addi-tional third of the tested antibodies showed better immunohis-tochemical signals following NBF and antigen retrieval (AR); only 2 antibodies gave better immunohistochemical staining results for acetone-fixed tissue sections. It is important to note that cytoplasmic proteins showed comparable immunohis-tochemical signals between acetone- and NBF-fixed tissu