Ultimate Abs

Antibody Purification Reagents

The immune response is often exploited to produce those remarkably useful affinity reagents known as antibodies. Today's biological and biomedical laboratories employ an array of different immunochemical techniques. For example, a specific antibody can be harnessed to screen for the presence of its respective antigen, quantify the amount of antigen in a given sample, determine the antigen's subcellular location, isolate the antigen from complex mixtures, and search for other macromolecules that interact with the antigen. This article highlights a number of different antibody purification options.

Don't Be Crude

Some immunochemical techniques require the use of purified antibodies; in other applications, the investigator can choose to use purified or crude preparations.^1,2 Pure antibodies are required for direct detection methods in which the primary antibody itself is labeled with an easily identifiable tag. If the antibody is to be immobilized to a support (for example, ELISA microtiter plates...