SNAGGING PEPTIDES: Bianca Loveless and Matt Pope from Terry Pearson’s lab discuss a an experiment using a Biacore instrument. TERRY PEARSON
When researchers talk about antibodies, one of the first things they want to know is how well an antibody binds to its target—in other words, how specific it is. In a survey of antibodies use in the lab, conducted by business research firm Frost and Sullivan for The Scientist, 84 percent of respondents said that measuring antibody specificity was very important to their research.
For the characterization of antibody specificity, label-free detection systems using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) are king. Unlike ELISA or fluorescence-based techniques, these systems can measure the binding and dissociation of antibody and antigen—as well as other binding partners, such as DNA and lipids—in real time. As a result, one can study antibody interactions with very rapid on- and off-rates, and thus ...
