[CITATION][C] An open letter to our readers on the use of antibodies

CB Saper - Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2005 - Wiley Online Library
Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2005Wiley Online Library
The Journal has repeatedly, over the last few years, received distressed communications
from authors, who have had to withdraw papers because an antibody against a novel
marker was found to stain tissue in knockout animals, who lack that target protein. In many
cases these papers contained careful characterization of the antibodies and
immunocytochemical controls. This issue has sensitized the Editors to the problem of
antibody specificity, and we soon realized that many of the papers we were publishing had …
The Journal has repeatedly, over the last few years, received distressed communications from authors, who have had to withdraw papers because an antibody against a novel marker was found to stain tissue in knockout animals, who lack that target protein. In many cases these papers contained careful characterization of the antibodies and immunocytochemical controls. This issue has sensitized the Editors to the problem of antibody specificity, and we soon realized that many of the papers we were publishing had very limited characterization or controls for antibodies that were used. Subsequently the Editors noticed that a number of commercially available antisera, particularly against G-protein coupled receptors, gave staining patterns that did not match mRNA distributions, and that these antibodies still stained tissue from animals in which the receptor had been knocked out. We felt that the integrity of scientific communication was being threatened by the proliferation of poorly characterized antibodies that produce artifactual staining patterns, and therefore came up with a minimal set of rules for identification, characterization, and controls for immunohistochemistry that we are attempting to apply to all manuscripts that we publish (Saper and Sawchenko, 2003). The result has been a substantial degree of confusion about what information is necessary for a paper in JCN (or any other journal, for that matter), to provide a reasonable level of assurance that an antibody is actually recognizing what it is supposed to be staining. In the interest of demystifying this procedure further, we present the following brief description of the three basic elements that are necessary in describing an antibody for use in neuroscience:
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