Perfect storm to fix antibody problems?
- 02:15pm September 9, 2016
- Anita Bandrowski
This article comes from the GBSI folks, reporting on antibody validation solutions:
Well, the prefect storm has converged, and
a proposal for validation of antibodies continues the year-long effort by many in the research community to fix a widely-known problem in research and reproducibility – poorly characterized antibodies. This first of many efforts to come to a head is led by Mathias Uhlen and the ad-hoc International Working Group on Antibody Validation, and outlines five conceptual pillars for antibody validation to be used in an application-specific manner. Several of the co-authors will present their paper at HUPO 2016 later this month in Taipei. Additional efforts include the
2nd International Antibody Validation Meeting on September 15th in the UK, and one by
GBSI that you may have heard about. An online community has emerged to help crowdsource potential standards and will continue to drive the conversation. Still not convinced this is a big deal? Thermo Fisher Scientific has
pledged to verify the specificity of their antibodies in line with these new recommendations. Pair these and other activities with
Cell’s STARMethods and the future is looking brighter for research reproducibility.