Where To Buy Antibodies
Bio-Rad is a global manufacturer and supplier of over 10,000 antibodies, kits and accessories. When you buy antibodies from us, not only do we provide antibodies of the highest quality, but we also pride ourselves on providing great customer support as well.
where to buy antibodies
We also offer custom antibody services with a variety of manufacture and modification options. Whether you need a large amount of antibodies for a specific project, or the in-house demand exceeds your capacity, Bio-Rad can accommodate your needs. You can buy custom antibodies on a one-off basis or as part of an ongoing production provision.
When you buy antibodies from us, we stand behind the quality of that antibody. Bio-Rad performs both in house testing, as well as a thorough review of published literature, to determine which applications are suitable for use with our antibodies.
We are also very proud of the high quality of our HuCAL custom monoclonal antibodies. With over 45 billion unique Fab antibody sequences in our HuCAL PLATINUM library, we are confident that we can generate an antibody against any antigen.
An antibody is a Y shaped protein that is produced in the immune system and is designed to target a specific protein or molecule. Due to the highly specific nature of antibodies, they can be used as powerful tools for research. Over the years a variety of techniques and applications have been developed using antibodies. These include Immunoassays, Flow Cytometry, Immunohistochemistry, Western blotting and more.
R&D Systems offers a wide range of antibodies to cytokines, adhesion molecules, proteases, neurotrophic factors, stem cell factors, signal transduction molecules, and developmental proteins. Monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies are available with multiple labeled options or unlabeled. With over 20,000 antibody products validated in 25+ species and 15+ applications, our antibodies fit into all work flows.
Primary antibodies are used to detect a wide range of targets in variety of applications. R&D Systems offers an extensive catalog of primary antibodies to take your research to the next level. We offer traditional monoclonal antibodies and polyclonal antibodies as well as recombinantly expressed antibodies. We provide multiple size options from our sample size to test an antibody to our ability to scale up antibody product and provide large quantity bulk sizes.
Recombinant Monoclonal AntibodiesMinimize one source of experimental variability with recombinant antibodies. We offer recombinant rabbit monoclonal antibodies as well as recombinant mouse and rat antibodies from our traditional hybridomas.
Blocking/Neutralizing AntibodiesOur extensive collection of proteins and our bioassay expertise allow us to provide the best and most dependable selection of blocking/neutralizing antibodies on the market.
In this series of webinars, we will provide investigators with the necessary tools to design, run, and analyze a multi-parameter flow cytometric experiment. Flow cytometry is a powerful technique that allows researchers to examine multiple proteins on cell populations using fluorescently labeled antibodies. In order to maximize the quality of results obtained, researchers should become familiar with the basics when setting up an experiment.
Learn more about the R&D Systems approach to developing antibodies. This webinar highlights the importance of having an integrated approach to antibody development, which includes antigen design, testing, and quality control. Using examples for Western Blot, flow cytometry, and other major applications we will show some pitfalls and improvements in our 20 years of experience in developing new reagents.
In many instances, common sense and experience come to the rescue. If we are studying an extracellular matrix molecule and our antiserum picks out nuclei like beacons, it is time for some healthy skepticism. Many investigators use multiple antibodies from different sources and compare staining patterns. This is a good approach, particularly if they are a mix of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies and especially if they recognize different epitopes on the antigen in question. Of course if the antigen has a well-described distribution in a particular tissue or cell type, this is easily checked. Antigen adsorption, where the antibody is premixed with the appropriate purified antigen before application to the tissue sections or cells, seems to be a dead art. It is a powerful way to look for nonspecific reactivities. In many cases, this is understandable; sufficient purified antigen may not be at hand. Unfortunately, many commercial antibodies are not affinity purified from serum. It is quite common that a polyclonal antiserum will not only recognize the antigen in question but other proteins in addition. This is usually quite clear in Western blots and leaves no clear way forward except affinity purification. With a commercial antibody, this can be expensive, and then it is time to get on the telephone and start a constructive conversation.
This antibody has been used for staining of 44 normal human tissue samples as well as human cancer samples covering the 20 most common cancer types and up to 12 patients for each cancer type. The results are part of an ongoing effort to map the human proteome using antibodies.
The Berglund study also highlights a second source of the antibody problem: commercially available antibodies have similar failure rates. This confirmed what many already knew to be true; just because an antibody is commercially available does not ensure its quality. However, the study also points to the solution. Failure rates among the 51 represented vendors ranged from 0 to 100%, suggesting that proper validation and quality control can allow vendors to provide high quality reagents.
The high failure rate of commercially available antibodies identified by Berglund and authors of similar studies is concerning because time and money are wasted. An estimated US$800 million are wasted annually on poorly performing antibodies and US$350 million are lost in biomedical research because published results cannot be replicated, with bad antibodies the likely culprit in many cases (Bradbury & Plückthun, 2015).
For example, several years of research from multiple laboratories suggested that erythropoietin activates the erythropoietin receptor (EpoR) in tumor cells; a follow-up study, however, showed that only one of the four EpoR antibodies used in these studies detected EpoR and none of the four antibodies were suitable for immunohistochemistry (Elliottet al., 2006). Similarly, Prassas and Diamandis spent two years and $500,000 investigating CUZD1, a potential biomarker for pancreatic cancer, using an ELISA assay that turned out to recognize CA125 instead (Prassas & Diamandis, 2014). Cases such as these have led some to suggest that irreproducibility should carry with it greater consequences, such as a requirement for academic institutions to return some or all of the grant money used to fund studies that prove irreproducible (Rosenblatt, 2016).
A polyclonal antibody is a mixture of antibodies that all recognize different epitopes of the protein of interest. This makes these antibodies well-suited for proteins that may have posttranslational modifications or heterogeneity in structure or sequence, proteins present at low concentrations, or applications that require fast binding to a protein of interest. Because polyclonal antibodies are generated in animals, they show relatively high batch-to-batch variability and are thus a poor choice for long-running studies that require repurchasing of the antibody, or for applications that have low tolerance for variability. If your experiments have low tolerance for variability, but only polyclonal antibodies are available, ask the vendor to provide antibodies from only a single lot.
Monoclonal antibodies are generated by a single B-cell line and thus recognize only a single epitope of a protein of interest. This makes these antibodies highly specific and results generated with them more reproducible. Their high specificity makes monoclonals an ideal choice for immunohistochemistry applications, and the ability to generate immortal B-cell hybridomas ensures greater batch-to-batch homogeneity. Because these antibodies recognize a single epitope they can be more challenging to work with when looking at low-abundance proteins or proteins that show variability, such as those with posttranslational modifications, in the epitope recognized by the antibody.
One caveat of monoclonal antibodies is that immortal B-cell hybridomas are not as eternal as their name implies; cell lines can die, not recover from frozen stocks, or even lose their antibody gene. Thus, for applications that have no tolerance for variability, recombinant antibodies are recommended. These custom synthetic antibodies provide an unlimited supply of identical antibodies, removing any batch-to-batch variability. Recombinant antibodies can be engineered to bind an epitope of choice with much higher affinity than that obtainedin vivo. Because large libraries can be screened in a high-throughput manner, antibodies can be generated that distinguish similar compounds and bind their ligands only under desired conditions, such as a specific pH.
The high reproducibility and entirely animal-free production process has led the pharmaceutical industry to adopt recombinant antibodies as their preferred tool. Many academics, on the other hand, understandably consider recombinant antibodies a last resort due to their higher cost. However, particularly for long-term studies, recombinant antibodies should be seriously considered due to their batch-to-batch consistency and their guaranteed continuity of availability without any dependence on animal immunization. 041b061a72