Free antibody sample, is it always the best solution?

A free antibody sample is often requested by antibody end users with the purpose to assess if a given antibody will work on a chosen species or application. However, one can answer this question and save precious working time in the lab by doing a sequence homology analysis of the sequence that was used to develop a given antibody, and the sequence for the protein of interest. This analysis can be done by the antibody provider and is usually very accurate.

The location of an antigen, in case of antibodies developed to peptides, can reveal if an antibody may work in techniques which require detection of a native protein, like immunoprecipitation and ChIP. Antibodies made to exposed regions of a protein, will have a higher likelihood of working in those techniques.

For antibodies which were never used on a given species or application, careful interpretation of obtained results is necessary. This includes specific controls, like overexpressed proteins, extracts from mutants or samples from other species, on which the antibody has been used successfully.

Agrisera offers several antibodies as free samples for testing. List of available antibodies can be found here.

Contact us in case you are interested.

Free antibody sample, is it always the best solution?

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