GEN: Validating Antibodies for Specificity

Validating Antibodies for Specificity

siRNA Knockdown Adds Critical Negative Control

Though an essential component of experimental design, negative controls are not implemented widely by antibody manufacturers and distributors. Neglecting this important validation step has resulted in the proliferation of nonspecific, poorly validated antibodies, thus contributing to a major problem in biomedicine: the reproducibility crisis.

The research community reportedly wastes an estimated $800 million every year on low-quality antibodies, and published research retractions over the past ten years have increased tenfold. By adopting negative controls as standard validation protocol, manufacturers, distributors, and individual labs working together can improve scientific reproducibility and accelerate the development of invaluable treatments.

This tutorial outlines a validation experiment using short interfering RNA (siRNA) knockdown, a powerful negative control method, and includes tips to optimize siRNA transfection experiments.

Proteintech: Original Manufacturer, Original Products

Part of Proteintech’s early vision was to make all its own products, to the highest standards possible and to take complete responsibility for the quality of each product.

• Proteintech make every single antibody in its 12,000+ catalog.
• All products are exclusively available to buy through Proteintech and its approved distributors.
• Each Proteintech antibody is unique and cannot be bought under a different label.