Freshly prepared immune complexes with intermittent microwave irradiation result in rapid and high-quality immunostaining.

We have previously reported that intermittent microwave irradiation shortened the primary or secondary antibody incubation time to 10 min in a special moist chamber. To achieve precise immunostaining within 1h, we attempted to generate a novel procedure, "freshly prepared immune complex with intermittent microwave irradiation (f-IC-M)". The advantage of this immunostaining procedure lies in a one-step incubation instead of primary and then secondary antibody application. In this study, we employed five primary antibodies to examine the efficiency and quality of this procedure. As expected, every primary antibody examined brought about precise immunostaining within 45 min for formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded sections, and within 15 min for frozen sections. In addition, this procedure is able to generate double-immunoenzymatic staining with different enzyme-labeled primary antibodies if desired. As any combination of primary and secondary antibodies is possible by this one-step application, f-IC-M increases the efficiency of immunostaining without losing quality. Therefore, this procedure is able to rapidly provide diagnostic information to the pathologists.