What type of antibody is right for me?

The right decision on this for most labs comes down to some combination of science and cost.? Some questions to consider are:

How much material will you need, and for how long?

Early exploratory type projects may only require a limited amount of material, or your workflow may be such that only a few micrograms of antibody are used at a time.? Utilizing polyclonal generation can be very effective for these situations.? Rabbits are the industry standard for polyclonals due to having a robust immune system and the flexibility to produce antibodies for years at a time if needed.? If you need greater amounts of material up front instead of over a long period of time, immunizing a larger animal such as a goat instead may be helpful.?

If you are trying to produce reagents for an assay that has the potential to be used indefinitely, however, monoclonal production may be more ideal.

Is it imperative that the activity in the antibody is always the same, or is some lot-to-lot variation workable within your system?

With polyclonal production, animals are immunized and your testing article becomes everything that is collected as a result.? Variation or maturation in the response can occur over time, but this can be mitigated by using consistent amounts of antibody in your assay.?

Meanwhile, the defining purpose of monoclonal production is performing multiple screening steps to find a single cell line that expresses the antibody that reacts best for your assay.? As long as stability can be maintained, this cell line should then be able to express the antibody as long as you need it.? The ultimate assurance of consistency in the end would be to sequence the variable regions of the antibody and produce it as a recombinant protein.?

Are there any time constraints to the project?

The average polyclonal project takes three months, while it can take six months to isolate a specific monoclonal cell line that performs as desired. Producing an antibody as a recombinant protein after that may take an additional three months or more.?

Do you already have an existing antibody that you wish to use in parallel with the newly generated material?

Regardless of whether the antibody you currently have is polyclonal or monoclonal, select a different species to use for development of the second antibody.?This way you can probe with separate secondary antibodies and view both reactivities at once. For example, making a polyclonal in chicken, goat, or guinea pig are the options selected most often for parallel use with existing rabbit antibodies.?

What is your budget?

High-throughput needs of multiple antibodies at once will mostly likely utilize polyclonal production due to the inherent cost benefits (an average monoclonal costs about six times the average polyclonal).?For early-stage diagnostics or therapeutics, however, beginning your project as a monoclonal may suit your overall needs better and pay dividends in terms of project acceleration.

Find out more on our custom antibodies webpage.

Did you know that Biosynth has an expansive collection of catalog antibodies with the option to be custom labeled? Choose from dye labels and fluorophores, biotin, or ask about other options.

Simply click the 'Custom Antibody Label' button on your selected antibody's product page:

Then fill out our quick and easy form:

Contact our antibody specialists for more information.