Recent years, an increasing number of scientists prefer to change their traditional methods in conducting biological experiments.
It’s reported that more than 100 researchers from around the world raised a proposal on changing the way of using antibody. Some researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory said that an antibody should be defined by its own specific sequences like genes. Since antibody is necessary medicine world, its quality is worthy of massive trails. The problem now is how to get high-quality antibodies.
Referring the available detective antibody by encoding the sequences of various subunits allow world-wide researchers to use an antibody with similar affinity under the same condition. Certainly, in such issue, the concentration and standardization of an antibody are regarded as two crucial elements while conducting antibody experiment. Generally speaking, the sequences of an antibody or binding reagent can be regarded as a kind of ultimate “barcode”, which ensures that everyone can use the same reagent to detect the same target. Therefore, exporting the barcode requires the selection of antibody from in vitro library or the work of antibody genes in hybridoma’s cloning and sequencing, which clearly requires major changes in the pattern of antibody supply.
As is known, antibody is a special class of proteins that can help the body to identify and neutralize bacteria as well as other attacks launched by immune system, which explains why scientists always use antibody as a specific binding reagent. However, it is difficult to control the quality of antibody and identify the expressing requirements of sequences. Many scientists are confused about the solutions, because antibody is different from genes, plasmids, and other features. As for biological researchers, they believe that there is a huge difference in the quality of all antibodies in terms of different manufacturers.
More specifically, most antibodies are rarely verified while it’s extremely common to see the differences between batches, polyclonal antibody production, for instance. It is produced by injecting a protein into an animal and then extracting the antibody that responses to the immune protein of animal blood. However, only 0.5%-5% of these antibodies are in high quality. Therefore, some scientists propose to use an in vitro method to generate the antibody without animals, which can directly generate the molecules with known sequences.
Briefly, antibody research requires more efforts. Only by this way won’t the research resources get wasted.
About Author
Candy Swift is a research assistant of Creative Biolabs.
