Don't blame it all on antibodies – The need for exhaustive characterisation, appropriate handling, and addressing the issues that affect specificity

Abstract

'Don't blame it all on antibodies-the need for exhaustive characterisation, appropriate handling, and addressing the issues that affect specificity' Highlights  Antibodies are used to determine biomedical, environmental and food analytes.  Recombinant antibodies offer greater opportunities for use/characterisation.  Quality-control is critical for specificity testing.  New analytical technologies make greater characterisation feasible.  Poor antibody performance may be due in part to inappropriate usage.  This review highlights these issues and suggests ways to successfully address them.

On the interactions of the receptor-binding domain of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins with monoclonal antibodies and the receptor ACE2

“…Antibody-antigen recognition is a challenger and intensive research field. (Poveda-Cuevas et al, 2020;Regenmortel, 2014;Ramaraj et al, 2012;O'Kennedy et al, 2017). It is a molecular process that involves different physical intermolecular interactions.…”

Ten Basic Rules of Antibody Validation

“…In between, several activities have been started to improve the situation and some very useful suggestions have been made and publis hed. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] In addition, many companies have discovered the issue and offer reagents with enhanced validation features. Also, some journals already toughened their editorial policies.…”

Challenges in Developing a Biochip for Intact Histamine Using Commercial Antibodies

“…Several authors have addressed the issue and claimed for better characterization and profound information on the specificity and cross-reactivity of the antibodies [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. The antibodies in the market are often insufficiently characterized and furthermore they might possess batch-to-batch variation, usually in much larger extent with polyclonal antibodies compared to monoclonal.…”

“…The recommended applications are mainly immunohistochemistry (IHC) or immunocytochemistry (ICC), but also western blot, EIA and ELISA. Recently, several studies have pointed out the quality issues and traceability problem concerning commercial antibodies and the lack of quality in the antibody market has been widely recognized by the scientific community [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Often, the characterization and specifications provided by the manufacturers are somewhat incomplete and, furthermore, the authors often fail to identify the exact antibody used [28][29][30] for other researchers to be able to purchase the same product.…”