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Review
. 2024 Aug 14:13:e100211.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.100211.

Antibody characterization is critical to enhance reproducibility in biomedical research

Richard A Kahn  1 , Harvinder Virk  2 , Carl Laflamme  3 , Douglas W Houston  4 , Nicole K Polinski  5 , Rob Meijers  6 , Allan I Levey  7 , Clifford B Saper  8 , Timothy M Errington  9 , Rachel E Turn  10 , Anita Bandrowski  11 , James S Trimmer  12 , Meghan Rego  13 , Leonard P Freedman  14 , Fortunato Ferrara  15 , Andrew R M Bradbury  15 , Hannah Cable  16 , Skye Longworth  17
Affiliations
Review

Antibody characterization is critical to enhance reproducibility in biomedical research

Richard A Kahn et al. Elife. .

Abstract

Antibodies are used in many areas of biomedical and clinical research, but many of these antibodies have not been adequately characterized, which casts doubt on the results reported in many scientific papers. This problem is compounded by a lack of suitable control experiments in many studies. In this article we review the history of the 'antibody characterization crisis', and we document efforts and initiatives to address the problem, notably for antibodies that target human proteins. We also present recommendations for a range of stakeholders - researchers, universities, journals, antibody vendors and repositories, scientific societies and funders - to increase the reproducibility of studies that rely on antibodies.

Keywords: RRID; YCharOS; antibody characterization; antibody validation; cell biology; immunology; inflammation; none; renewables; reproducibility.

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Conflict of interest statement

RK, HV, CL, DH, NP, RM, AL, CS, TE, RT, JT, LF, FF, AB, SL No competing interests declared, AB Co-founder and serving as CEO of SciCrunch Inc, a company that works with publishers to improve the scientific literature; the terms of this agreement have been approved by the COI office at the University of California at San Diego, MR Employed by Addgene, a company that may be affected financially by the opinions reported in this article, HC Employed by Abcam, a for-profit company that sells antibodies and which may be affected financially by the opinions reported in this article

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Key projects related to antibody characterization.
Timeline showing when the projects discussed in this article were started: the Protein Capture Reagents Program and the Affinomics project were funded for five years (as indicated by dashed lines). CPTAC: Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium; FASEB: Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology; HUPO: Human Proteome Organization; OGA: Only Good Antibodies; RRID: Research Resource Identifier; YCharOS: Antibody Characterization through Open Science.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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