Mouse IL-1beta ELISA MAX™ Standard Kit by BioLegend comes with many of the supplies necessary to complete ELISAs using 5, 10, or 20 96-well plates. The plates are not included in the kit; the kit does contain 300µL vials of concentrated capture antibody and detection antibody. The kit also contains a vial of IL-1beta standard with instructions on how to dilute it to get the proper standard curves. Besides the instructions, the last item in the kit is a vial of 1000x Avidin-HRP for dilution. The instruction sheet for dilutions of the IL-1beta standard was easy to follow and enough standard was provided for all of the plates that the kit is equipped to complete. This kit does not provide coating buffer, TMB substrate solution, or diluent for diluting samples or anitbodies. The protocol does provide a recipe or catalog number for making or purchasing all these additional reagents which are necessary to complete your ELISA.
I first used this kit when trying to detect IL-1beta production in the supernatants of mouse bone marrow derived macrophages. The kit was simple enough to use for someone who has done several ELISAs in the past, as I had. It gave reproducible results which seemed accurate and were in line with what was expected in my experiment. It also gave a good standard curve with a high enough top standard that dilution of the samples wasn’t necessary for the experiments that I was doing. All in all, it had many great aspects that I was looking for in an ELISA kit.
With all that being said, this kit did have a couple shortcomings. First, while the standard curve instruction sheet was easy to follow, the protocol sheet for the rest of the ELISA was very dense and I found it difficult to locate the information I was looking for it while I was completing the ELISA. Since I had done several ELISAs before using this kit, it didn’t hamper my progress much, but for someone who has never done an ELISA, this could be detrimental. The other major downside to this kit was that the coating buffer, assay diluent, and TMB substrate were not included. These don’t take a lot of work to make or buy, but they can be a hassle if you are in a time crunch.