Polyclonal Antibody Services - Reagents to Diagnostics

Polyclonal antibodies are used in a wide variety of applications, including laboratory and in diagnostics. In the laboratory polyclonal antibody may be the most common reagent used for western blotting and immune histo-chemistry.

There are many companies offering ready to use catalogue polyclonal antibodies to a wide variety of target proteins. Most of these are made against the terminal peptide epitope of the target protein in an assembly line manner. But validated antibody for particular application is limited. One of the major problems faced by most researchers using ready to use, off- the-shelf, polyclonal antibody is inconsistency and often total lack of specificity towards indented target. Antibody that works in one application may not work in another technique. Antibodies that can detect conformational epitope or work in fictional assays are more difficult to come by.

Antibody Research Corporation offer polyclonal antibody development is mouse, rat, rabbit, chicken, and goat. The choice of animal depends on the quantity, quality, and time required to generate the antibody. We offer polyclonal antibody development in as short as 20 days in mouse. Large-scale production in goats with 4 – 10 liters of serum can last 6-10 months. While short-term projects in mouse can provide required reagents to validate assays quickly, large-scale production in goats can cut per unit manufacturing cost and provide large lots needed to avoid variability between lots.

A unique aspect of Antibody Research Corporation is the ability to make polyclonal antibody to a protein that is not available for immunization. We can identify the most immunogenic domain of interest and clone and express it to generate antibody by genetic immunization. Preparation of purified protein is not a prerequisite. For biomarker development, we also offer peptide identification in biological samples by mass spectrometry, and using those as starting material for polyclonal antibody development.

The need for polyclonal antibody is predicted to grow exponentially over the next many years. As more and more proteins are identified in many different species of organisms, reagents needed for detection will increase. Although the number of human genes is limited, alternate splice forms of proteins add another level of complexity. Posttranslational modifications such as glycosylation, phosphorylation, methylation and acetylation adds many orders of complexity. We are just beginning to understand the forms and types of glycosylations of proteins, probably due to lack of tools needed for analysis such as specific antibodies.

Our custom polyclonal antibody services offer affinity purification of antibodies leading to high affinity and specific polyclonal antibody with titers in excess of 100,000. In fact, when we initially started offering custom polyclonal services, our biggest complaint we got was high background in westerns due to high specificity and concentration of our antibodies. Typically our custom made polyclonal antibodies can be diluted to 1:100,000 or more to get a clean image, compared to about 1:5000 dilutions for most of the off-the-shelf products.

The choice of many available species for development of polyclonal antibody makes it easy to identify suitable species for best results. We do comparative sequence analysis across specifies to predict the outcome with good success rate. We also offer free sequence analysis services for peptide and protein design. Antibody Research Corporation always guarantees their services.