When doing WBs, IFs or IHCs, we normally pay a lot of attention to the primary antibody that should be chosen. We look at the datasheet, we check that the primary antibody has been validated for the species and application of our interest, we check if it has been used in publications, we look at the pictures in the datasheet… but sometimes we forget about the secondary.

Here are some tips to help you choose the best secondary. Because a good choice of a secondary antibody can be as important as choosing the right primary! Thanks to Camilo Moncada, Ph.D., from Rockland Inc, for his support!

Whether your protein is simple to produce, or complex and requires more development, in any case, outsourcing your protein expression, purification and production is a very viable option for your projects.

Saving time, resources and money is nearly always a top priority, so calling on outsourcing services to allow you to re-allocate your staff and fund savings makes sense. Particularly given that all the tedious and hard work in optimizing ideal protein expression and purification processes will have already been done for you!

One of the challenges in R&D is to find robust technologies to develop diagnostic tests. Notably, it could be within a context of asymptomatic infections for which reliable detection of positive specimens is crucial.

Jordi Landiera et al. have just published an article in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology (doi.org/10.1128/JCM.00565-18) using a combination of PCR and immunoassays to reveal the benefit of an HRP2-based ultrasensitive rapid diagnostic test that was developed to improve the detection of Plasmodium falciparum low density infections.

Whether you wish to perform protein expression profiling for biomarker validation, are deciphering a disease physio-pathology, are looking for the right target to study the effect of your compounds or keen to check what its mechanism of action may be, it’s not always easy to decide on the best tool to choose. I have selected a few solutions below that may bring some quick answers to these questions, and help you move faster to the next step of your biomarker project: they’re either quick to implement in your own lab or easily outsourced at a reasonable cost in a European partner platform.