Mass spectrometry immunohistochemistry-proteomics

When fresh or frozen tissue is used for proteomic analyses, the results cannot be related directly to the clinical course of diseases in a timely manner. Instead, researchers frequently reduce the number of interesting proteins to a manageable number and then attempt to use immunohistochemistry to understand the implications of proteomic changes in archival formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue for which the clinical course has been established.3 Unfortunately, immunohistochemistry is a semiquantitative pro-teomic method, and the choice of interesting proteins must occur without advance knowledge of the clinical course of the disease or the response to therapy. If routinely fixed and embedded archival tissues could be used for standard proteomic methods such as 2-D gel electrophoresis and mass spectrometry (MS), these powerful techniques could be used to both qualitatively and quantitatively analyze large numbers of tissues for which the clinical course has been established. However, analysis of archival FFPE tissues by... 

Melle, C., Ernst, G., Schimmel, B., Bleul, A, Koscielny, S., Wiesner, A., Bogumil, R., Moller, U., Osterloh, D., Halbhuber, K.J., and F. Von Eggling, 2003, Biomarker Discovery and Identification in Laser Microdissected Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma with ProteinChip(R) Technology, Two-dimensional Gel Electrophoresis, Tandem Mass Spectrometry, and Immunohistochemistry. Mol Cell Proteomics. 2(7) 443-52. 

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