As an antibody manufacturer with our own production facility and testing laboratory, GeneTex has over 20 years of experience validating antibodies. Our antigen affinity-purified polyclonal antibodies are routinely evaluated using Western blot, immunocytochemistry and immunohistochemistry. As with all polyclonal antibodies, there is the concern of batch-to-batch differences due to variations in the immune response of the host. Therefore, each subsequent lot must be retested in all applications and species. This is a time-consuming, costly and labor-intensive process, but is necessary to guarantee consistency in GeneTex’s polyclonal antibody products. A similarly rigorous screening process is applied to the selection of our mouse monoclonal antibody reagents.
In addition, given the reality that antibodies often perform best in an application-dependent fashion, obtaining convincing data for multiple applications and species with one antibody is often impossible. As a result, multiple antibodies to the same target are produced and validated for specific needs. At this time, RNAi-mediated knockdown validation is also utilized on an increasing scale.
As a complementary approach to validate our products, GeneTex also encourages researchers to submit “Star Reviews” where they evaluate our antibodies and provide independent user reviews. GeneTex also cites published papers where an antibody was used successfully.
GeneTex has more recently implemented a systematic analysis of our antibody reagents using more definitive means to confirm specificity. These efforts are encapsulated in our “Knockout/Knockdown Validation” program. Beginning with our most popular products, GeneTex is evaluating its antibodies through Western blot using cell lysates generated by either shRNA-mediated knockdown or CRISPR-mediated knockout of the target protein. In particular, GeneTex’s leadership has made a substantial commitment to incorporate CRISPR-mediated knockout validation as a central pillar of the QA protocol.