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George et al.--

On 2/22/2015 11:31 PM, George McNamara wrote:
> I encourage everyone on the listserv to read Bradbury et al's comment 
> in Nature, and to pass it on to your colleagues who use antibodies and 
> similar reagents.
>
> full text is freely available at
>
> http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-standardize-antibodies-used-in-research-1.16827 
>
>
> Summary:
>
> *To save millions of dollars and dramatically improve reproducibility, 
> protein-binding reagents must be defined by their sequences and 
> produced as recombinant proteins, say Andrew Bradbury, Andreas 
> Plückthun and 110 co-signatories.*
>

Interesting idea, as long as you aren't doing research in an area for which the soon-to-be required recombinant antibodies aren't available.

To quote from the article, "If these steps are taken, scientists will not want to use unsequenced binding reagents, and the absence of sequencing information will lead to market disadvantages for vendors. The uncharacterized, unsequenced research antibody will become obsolete."  --Not all antibodies are generated by companies--many of the most important are generated by researchers themselves.  This proposal could have the effect of forcing most all
biomedical research down a set of predetermined, prescribed channels, with only limited room for development of new reagents.  Their goal is worthy, but this policy strikes me as likely to have some unintended bad consequences.

Martin Wessendorf


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