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Validating antibodies used in experiments could ‘free up billions of research dollars’, head of standards institute says More than 100 biomedical research experts have met in the US to start developing the first-ever standardised guidelines for using antibodies in science. The differing quality of biological reagents – the chemicals used in experiments – such as antibodies, and the lack of standard approaches to research using them, is thought by many to play a major part in

Biomedical experts plan to create a scoring system that will help researchers choose reliable antibodies for their experiments. The only problems: figuring out how such a ranking would work — and getting manufacturers to adopt the standard. The idea comes from a workshop hosted this week in Asilomar, California, by the Washington-based Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI), one of several groups concerned that poorly characterized antibodies are a major culprit behind

It seems like the most elementary of research principles: Make sure the cells and reagents in your experiment are what they claim to be and behave as expected. But when it comes to antibodies—the immune proteins used in all kinds of experiments to tag a molecule of interest in a sample—that validation process is not straightforward. Research antibodies from commercial vendors are often screened and optimized for narrow experimental conditions, which means they may not work as