antibody resources for experiments
Good antibodies are critical for any research involving qualitative or quantitative protein detection, isolation, localization and visualization (e.g. western blots, immunoprecipitation or immunohistochemistry). Good antibodies that specifically bind to your protein, at a specific epitope—reliably—can make your life and research so much easier. In contrast, if your antibody is non-specific, you will pick-up a ton of non-specific signal from other proteins, which may (depending on the application) significantly confound your results. Obviously, controls are a must and can be very helpful in interpreting your results in the setting of noise, but antibodies can sometimes generate so much noise that your desired signal is drowned out.
Usually, you will be able to get good antibodies for well known and well characterized proteins from most companies but as you start looking more obscure proteins, it gets harder and harder to find good antibodies as well as a good variety in the epitopes to which the antibodies are directed. There was a time in graduate school when I was looking at some rather obscure proteins—you know they are obscure when they are called [cytokine]-stimulated gene-1, [cytokine]-stimulated gene-2, [cytokine]-stimulated gene-3, etc.—and a simple western blot became a brutal task. A lot of times, you will have to go to specific labs that have generated antibodies to your protein (and this will be noted in the literature), but if you want to look for commercially available antibodies first, here are some companies that I, and other graduate students whom I have talked to over the years, have found to be pretty reliable in terms of quality as well as customer support (which I often didn’t take advantage of, but when I did was very surprised at how helpful they could be).
Cell Signaling Technologies(for cell signaling, in particular anti-phospho-protein antibodies)
Santa Cruz Biotechnology (a lot of variety—but reputation for quality is hit or miss amongst people I’ve talked to)
BD Biosciences (*the* place for conjugated flow cytometry antibodies)
Jackson ImmunoResearch Laboratories (for secondary antibodies)
These are of course just places that I’ve had routinely good experiences with. However, sometimes you may also find much smaller companies with very specific research focuses marketing very good antibodies to your protein, so try Google as well if you are trying to find antibodies to a particularly obscure protein or protein family.
