In a previous post, I introduced the C-series multiplex profiling technology from Raybiotech, a smart way to multiplex your western blot while saving time and sample volume, and decreasing the cost of your experiment.

Indeed, one blot for multiple targets processed at once is a nice way to boost your protein profiling studies!

I just wanted to highlight in this post, that on top of the standard species models like human, mouse and rat, these C-series are also available for many other models. With 15 different species to select from, RayBiotech is leading the way for immunoassay kit species diversity.

In a previous post, I introduced several biomarker arrays & assays, companion tools for biomarker discovery, monitoring and quantification. Today, I will focus more specifically on high density proteomics microarrays. This post aims at helping you understand what services are available in this domain and how they could fit within your project.

Indeed, tebu-bio has just been appointed by RayBiotech as one of the 3 companies worldwide to perform contract research on their recently developed higher density proteomics tools. A good opportunity to talk about this!

On your journey to Biomarker profiling, you will reach the point where you need to quantify the proteins of interest identified along the way (eg. validation of semi-quantitative array results; biomarker discovery with an initial hunch on which pathway is involved).

At this stage, you will have narrowed down the number of targets you want to look at. However, the use of ELISAs is likely to be still too costly, too time consuming, and may require too much sample volume.

One of the recurrent questions that we get at the Biomarkers team at tebu-bio is on what controls should be included in a given experiment. Either if the experiment is done by researchers in their lab, or if we collect their samples and perform the analysis in our lab, a good design starts by using the most convenient controls.

One of the controls is related to the study itself. In this sense, definition of what a control population is, and how we want to study it vs. a cohort of patients has been discussed elsewhere in a proteomics post. Today, we will put our spotlight on the “technical” controls, i.e. those related to the technique itself.