OBJECTIVES: Tissue array (TA) technology is widely used as a method for the in situ investigation of tissue markers in cancer studies. A limitation of this tech-nique is the high price of tissue arrayers. We describe two easy and non-expensive manual methods, that have produced small and medium format arrays.MATERIAL AND METHODS: 16 TAs were manually constructed from conventional paraffin blocks using two different techniques. For the first method, a 16G Tru-Cut needle whose bevel edge had been cut, was used to make the holes in the donor blocks (80 cases) and the receptor ones (resulting in 2 TAs each one with 55 cases and two with 25 cases). In the second technique, a 4 mm-diameter punch for cutaneous biopsies was applied to the donor blocks (obtaining 210 cylinders from 108 blocks) and to the receptor ones (12 TAs). Hematoxy-lin-eosin, immunohistochemical and in situ hybridization stains were performed on sections from these TAs.RESULTS: The tissue loss rate in the sections obtained from the TAs constructed with the first method was 26.5%, but as two cylinders were included from each case, at least one of them was retained. There was not any loss of tissue in the sections from the TAs constructed with the second method. The results of all of the stains performed were successful.CONCLUSIONS: These two manual methods of elab-oration of TAs result rather simple and they are econom-ical. The tissue loss rate is significant in the first method but it can be compensated embedding more than one cylinder from each donor block. There was not any problem in the sectioning of the TAs constructed with the second method.